Ross Sutherland: Infinite Lives (Try, try, try again)

Thank you for all your thoughts! I’ve really enjoyed reading through them. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to engage with the ideas of the poem and to make sense of them!

I’ve written some notes on this poem elsewhere on the site, but I wanted to do a follow up here.

A lot of the commenters have talked about video games and simulated worlds. It’s a subject I’ve got a lot of interest in. We are now entering a new era of thinking around videogames. Philosophy has always been interested in the difference between real and imagined worlds, but more than ever before, we’re getting to put a lot of those philosophical ideas into practice. I’m 35 years old, which makes me the same age as Pacman. Now as an adult, I find myself questioning the impact of games on my subconscious. I play Twitter as if it was a videogame. What other elements of my life have secretly undergone gamification? The boundaries have blurred.

I’m not much of a game critic / philosophy student. But I try to address these things in the poem. I must admit, I didn’t know the poem would be about videogames/simulations when I started it. This theme just came through in the writing process.

This is the first time my poetry has been discussed in this level of detail (there’s not a lot of critical writing within the contemporary UK poetry world). And it’s really interesting to see the poem dismantled on paper. As a poet, I spend a lot of time going on my nerve, but I don’t always get the time to look back and reflect on the decisions I made.

It’s a really interesting dilemma I think –
In Infinite Lives, we have a piece of autobiographical writing, transformed (through the editing process) into something much more abstract, dream-like. We get the sensation of a person looking back over their life, trying to make sense of the memories. But everything is moving too fast- one memory bleeds into the next. There are gaps in the poem- missing information. And this can create a more frustrating experience for the reader.

Without my notes, you can only enjoy this poem in a partial, impressionistic fashion. The beating heart is been removed from the body; the reader is left rooting through transcripts of dreams. Which is not to say that dreams can’t be fun / interesting! But the original purpose of the poem (self-discovery) has been replaced by something else (a simulation of self-discovery). Rather than having the poet speak to us directly, we’re put into the position of eavesdropper- listening to the poet as they speak to themselves.

I wonder- perhaps if the poem hadn’t ended with the line “OK I finally get it”, then the experience would have been less frustrating! As readers, we can accept that some poems can be enjoyed without locating the ‘answer’ within . But when the author themselves is shouting “I’ve had a revelation!” and the reader feels excluded from author’s thought process, then of course, we feel cheated!

A parody version of the poem:

Dogs quack in my rear view mirror
as I think of Dennis, his distinctive hairstyle
shimmering in my memory like a drowned fox
at the bottom of a swimming pool, discovered
one morning by my father who incidentally
used to wear a hat shaped a bit like Mount Snowden.
I climbed that mountain aged seventeen
and saw nothing from the peak
but the antique disappointment of British weather.
I used to own slippers shaped like turtles
and woah I just realised the meaning of life!

Ah, you could say that the poem “crashes” at the end! I hadn’t thought of it that way, but effectively that is what happens. The reader is thrown off the horse. The game ends.

On this blog, I’ve read several posts from students where they have responded to my poems by writing poems of their own. I think this is a fantastic way to understand poetry. You can use the form of a poem to have your own journey of self-discovery, rather than just a bystander on someone else’s journey. I think this is particularly true with a poem like Infinite Lives.

I’d say that at least 80% of the people who go to poetry readings in the UK also write poetry themselves. They’re not necessarily full-time writers, but they all write for fun. I used to find this so depressing! It seemed indicative of the problem with poetry. Poetry as the academic prop, incapable of reaching a neutral audience. I used to joke to my friends and say, “this proves that writing poetry is infinitely more fun than reading it!” But recently, I’ve had a change of perspective. I think I understand this situation a bit better now. I think that being a reader of poetry and being a writer of poetry NEED to go hand-in-hand. This is a new thought for me, but I’ll try to explain:

Recently, I’ve begun to think of a poem as an exercise in meditation. Through the form of the poem, the poet teaches us to group our thoughts in a particular way. The poet is guiding us by example, showing us a new way of examining the world. We read the poem over and over, learn the “moves” of the poet. Then, when ready, we attempt to put those lessons into play. We write our own version of the poem. Only once we have written OUR version, do we fully understand the original. Only then will we be able to write, “OK, I finally get it.”

This is something I’ve done all my life. If I see a poem I like, I copy it. I try to learn it from the inside, like learning a piece of music. I try to use artists as spiritual guides. Yes, art can help us grow as people! But only if we get involved. If we stand on the sidelines as a spectator, we relegate ourselves to being consumers. We have to enter the conversation & become part of the art ourselves. – Ross Sutherland