If all the World and Love were Young: Stephen Sexton on the Pastoral, Eulogy & Grief
A memoir-style collection of poetry told through the lens of a video game might sound on the surface like novelty, but the strange and pixilated frames of Super Mario Bros. in Stephen Sexton’s first full-length book, If All the World and Love Were Young are anything but cosmetic diversion. Sexton lives and grieves in these landscapes, transforming them into contemplation, ars poetica and lament.
The ekphrastic nature of Sexton’s world reveals a memory marked by his mother’s long fight with cancer. Via Super Mario Bros., he travels through his own interior, a landscape as phantasmal as the fictional universe he describes. Recently compared by The Sunday Times to the earlier work of Seamus Heaney, If All the World and Love Were Young offers, I believe, a lyrical giving of the self, and a reminder of the necessity of the imaginary.
Stephen, who teaches at Queens University Belfast, offered to answer a few questions for me regarding his debut book.
Can we start by talking about the title of your debut book? If All the World and Love Were Young, a reference to Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd” is an interesting choice. At what point in the writing process did you choose that title?
The title came to me rather late in the composition of the book, but it was by no means the final step. I was confident that the mode or genre I was most intimately involved in was the pastoral. Since this poem, ‘The Nymph’s Reply to Shepherd’, and its companion poem, Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ constitute an argument central to the concept of the pastoral, I had been thinking about them for some time. Put simply (perhaps too simply) the disagreement seems to boil down to one of idealism vs realism. Marlowe’s shepherd promises all kinds of fine things to the object of his woo: “coral clasps” and “amber studs”; “fair lined slippers for the cold / with buckles of the purest gold”. Here I was thinking a shepherd subsided on a modest income. Raleigh, on the other hand, takes issue with these obvious sophistications and unfulfillable promises: “the flowers do fade, and wanton fields, /to wayward winter reckoning yields, / a honey tongue, a heart of gall, / is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall”.
One of the concepts the book is concerned with is how one reconciles the weird, grief-dented condition the world takes on after the death of a close relative; how, when my mother died, the world came to seem unreal, and how I might go about coming back from that strange world. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that I’ve never felt of the book as being engaged with the idea of ‘escapism’. I seldom think of art as something I escape into, though I know that’s the case for many people. I recognize, however, that the book invites that suggestion. For me, though, it wasn’t about escaping into a fantastical realm of childhood memory, dinosaurs, fire-plants, mysterious and magical landscapes. Instead, my ambition was to find a way out of that world: not to go there to seek relief or refuge from grief, but to suddenly find oneself there in that world of image and metaphor, and to strive, however successfully, to get back to the real one. I suppose I hoped that by taking the first line of Raleigh’s rebuttal, I was aligning myself with that less desirable—but more true—way of seeing the world.
How did the metaphor of the book create itself?
Some time ago, I’d been writing a lot of ekphrastic poems as part of my PhD project. For me the relationship between text and image is a thrilling one; how the poetic image is different from the visual image; their common and various proficiencies of representation. However, I grew pretty bored pretty quick of looking for paintings or photographs or art objects more generally to gaze on. I could find no way to imagine a project made of poems flitting between these objects. The idea of that book seemed so dull to me – my shortcomings entirely. In any case, I soon found myself looking for less typical visual objects I might turn my weary ekphrastic pencil to.
So, as something of a joke, I figured why not write a poem for every single level of Super Mario World. I’d spent a great deal of my childhood roaming around its digital provinces, and could think of few engagements of poetry and video game. There are, of course, many, and in the course of my composition, I came across many. I really loved the poems of Hannah Faith Notess I managed to acquire in the chapbook Ghost House, shipping costs bedamned. I figured there was something a little mischievous too in blending the grand tradition of classical ekphrasis (Homer; Keats; Auden etc.) with the lovely exhilaration of the Super Nintendo. This wasn’t really a motivational impulse of any great importance. What I’ve done with Mario isn’t really any different from the ancient examples of the genre.
The book is concerned, among other things, with frames, and the instigating moment for the book as a whole is looking at a photograph my mother took of me as a child playing Super Mario World, the exact level of the game obscured by the camera’s flash. In one way, the ambition of the book is to ‘complete’ that image by describing every single level in the game, as if by completing the image, the ‘I’ might be consoled. In other words, if one can control the image—the totem— one can overcome the difficulty of grief. I’ve always been fascinated by that early example of ekphrasis: Homer’s Shield of Achilles, in which the object’s figurative sections are so impressively detailed, they contain, in an almost filmic flourish: the Earth, sky and sea, the sun, the moon and the constellations; two beautiful cities full of people: in one a wedding and a law case are taking place. The other city is besieged by one feuding army and the shield shows an ambush and a battle; a field being ploughed for the third time.
Besides these thoughts in the back of my mind, the main movement of the book is that between two worlds: the digital world of the video game and the real world outside. If, I reasoned, the pastoral as a genre involves a kind of unrealness, isn’t that what Mario’s condition is? And, if the world seems unreal to me in grief, is that the same thing?
What was the moment of development, the opening of the door when you realized you had to write this book?
There was such a moment, but it seemed to last for days rather than occurring as an instant of clarity or inspiration. This is, primarily, an elegy. It is, however, an elegy pretending not to be an elegy. This reluctance to acknowledge the work of grieving is one of the conventions of elegy, and in my case, the dazzling surfaces of the video game provide an ideal cover. As I’ve said, I started this project as something of a joke (silliness is a very useful mood for me) and found myself making fairly rapid progress through the levels, powered by that high-octane fuel of mischief. However, at some point, as I started thinking about the game and about my childhood and the house I grew up in and its garden, I sensed, as though over my shoulder, my mother, who died in 2012. It became impossible to proceed with these descriptions of landscape without acknowledging that what I was doing, whether I knew it or not, was writing an elegy.
Can we talk more about the individual poems? (I’m thinking of a few where your mind seems to take you outside of the primary conceit into an ars poetica of sorts. “#3 Lemmy’s Castle,” for example) And the reference to Breughel there?
There is throughout, I hope, these sense of two worlds of images engaging with each other, and yes, lots of ekphrasis. It became rather a tiring process at times to find new ways of interpreting the images of the video game, made as they are of recycled backgrounds and objects and sprites. In the example of “#3 Lemmy’s Castle,” there is a moment where Lemmy’s little legs are waggling not unlike Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, famously described by Auden. I suppose I wanted to declare by these references my enthusiasm for the genre and its debates. I’ve mentioned briefly how frames work in the book. In this case, I describe an image on the screen by describing a nearly 500-year old image. Moreover, I wanted to underscore my feeling that, for the purposes of image-text relations, Breughel’s image and Super Mario World are effectively the same thing, or at least belong to the same class of thing.
“#3 Lemmy’s Castle.” Can you just tell me what’s going on in your mind as you wrote that poem, particularly the way the narrator is observing the situation?
I wish I could tell you what was going on in my mind. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that I find it hard to truly think of these as poems. The book isn’t quite a long poem, but it might be; and yet the individual texts don’t quite feel like poems to me. They seem quite engaged with the project as a whole and what any particular moment in the narrative demands. For example, one of the enemies (or at least antagonists) of the part of the game to which this ‘poem’ corresponds, is a wizard whose magic changes blocks or cells into living creatures. So, given the context (a hospital), these wizards must be ‘translated’ into doctors and nurses. It’s a movement not entirely unlike the final scenes of The Wizard of Oz —now that I think of it—where Dorothy (and the viewer) see The Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow as their unfantastic counterparts. At this point in the narrative, the book is recounting cancer treatment, including chemotherapy and surgery. Specifically, the ‘poem’ concerns itself with the waiting after surgery; after what we expected to be the last resort, the cure.
… and “Forest of Illusion 1.” Do you mind expanding on the two languages there, the two names of the butterfly?
I made a pronounced effort to respond not just to the images and plot of the game but to its moods and challenges, its playfulness, too. This section, Forest of Illusion, is concerned with labyrinthine paths and dead ends; doors that open not outside but back into the house; things appearing not as they seem. In that spirit, poems in this section contain a line or two, scattered throughout, from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances,” a poem in which a speaker moves through a forest of symbols. It seemed relevant. The first lines of Baudelaire’s poem are loosely rendered in the first poem of this section. The whole sonnet occurs throughout the poems of this section, in a kind of glancing translation. With the butterflies, I suppose I was keen to restate the sense that one thing might be viewed in at least two ways: the person in the world might know it as the “Camberwell Beauty”; the grieving person might know it as the “Mourning Cloak.”
You refer to Ciaran Carson as “the Maestro.” Can you comment on the influence?
It’s difficult to come close to accounting for Ciaran’s influence. His is not simply an influence on the poems in terms of style or content, but also on how one thinks about language and the world, translation, metaphor, the idea of how one engages with or doesn’t engage with the Political, the whole enterprise. He was and is a very important presence at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he taught me and where I now work.
Many of the most meaningful interactions I had with Ciaran were in poetry workshops he ran on Friday afternoons, at which students would bring poems to discuss. His particular enthusiasm, it seemed in those discussions, was for etymology; for a word’s history and connotations and associations; what’s embedded in a word from another time and place; what’s the weight and consequence of using any given word.
As well as what I’ve learned from Ciaran, he’s simply an extraordinary writer of poetry and prose and memoir and essay. His book For All We Know is formally and technically stunning, and his book on Irish traditional music, Last Night’s Fun is utterly a masterpiece of anecdote and gastronomy.
In “Valley of Bowser 4,” you again seem to fall outside of the overall conceit. Can you remember what was going on in your mind when you wrote that poem? Where were you at?
Another reason, I suppose, that I can’t think of these quite as individual poems is that the poems and the titles aren’t really filed with each other in my memory, so I have to check the book to see which one is which! This one does indeed fall outside the conceit. As the book progresses, there’s a sense of that conceit straining, or more and more being drawn into the textures of the poems; the imagination straining to keep up with its own project. Moreover, the connections and associations between the video game and the ‘poem’ become more tenuous: an instance of flight elsewhere ends up with the Wright brothers. It’s true that it was demanding to keep up with the project I’d started, but it’s advantageous too—given the emotional intensity of what’s being described—to allow that difficulty to be seen. In short, this is a poem of stress, I think, both in terms of composition and of content.
Can I ask about “Forest of Illusion 4”? There is a balance between surrealism and the realistic there that I really enjoy. How did you consider this moment between the two modes of thought that generated this ethereal moment? How did it present itself?
This for me is a moment of stasis in the collection, roughly in the middle. If I knew there wasn’t going to be a happy ending, at least there might be a tranquil middle. It picks up on a few themes established earlier on: the garden both real and imaginary (Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” is a concept of poetry I’m on board with); the sleeplessness and anxiety of diagnosis and illness. I’m very pleased that balance of surrealism and realism comes across. It’s perhaps the chief mood of the whole thing.
How was it working in the imposed form of sixteen syllables per line? Can you explain the freedoms and the limitations of that choice? Did it spawn ideas?
It must be said that the sixteen-syllable line isn’t really a constriction in the way a five-syllable line is. In terms of a conceit, the Super Nintendo is a sixteen-bit system; a technology once sophisticated and brilliant, and now very much of the early 1990s. If the processor can deal with 16 bits of ‘memory’ at once, I figured I could make my poetic line similar work, processing 16 syllables of ‘memory’ per cycle. It was mostly means for me to give an identity to what I was writing, to feel I was engaging with the architecture of the video game, not just its images. When it came to it considering the title of the book, the fact that Raleigh’s (and Marlowe’s) poem uses an octo-syllabic line, exactly half of mine, felt like a good omen.
In “Front Door,” the final poem in the collection, Bowser is finally defeated, the game is over and there is a sense of “what now?” In what ways, if at all, do you see Super Mario Brothers as a sort of lost or abandoned childhood object of experience?
I can’t say I see it as lost or abandoned any more than you could say a memory is lost or abandoned. I played it for the first time when I was very young and it constitutes one of my first poignant imaginative experiences. I feel it is part of my psychic interior life in ways I can’t totally recognize. If anything, the book has, in some ways, involved a kind of blending of the video game and the experiences I’ve paired it with. Sometimes, I can’t think of the video game without thinking of the narrative of grief I’ve overlaid it with. It seems like I’ve done an act of vandalism to the game only I can see.
In your article “The Changing Mountain” you speak about Larry Levis and his approach to elegy. Did Levis have an influence on some of the particulars in this book? I’m thinking, in particular, about this notion of childhood toys abandoned, and the eerie qualities they take on when rediscovered.
I’m certain Larry Levis is involved in my creative faculties in many ways, but I don’t quite see him in this book. I’m a big fan of his work, particularly Elegy and The Widening Spell of the Leaves. What I admire most in his work is how elegantly his poems proceed and how comfortable his tone appears when it’s actually extremely precise. Being used to the Irish and British lyric, his longer poems felt like quite an undertaking for me when I first came into contact with them. If there’s any connection I can think of, it probably involves his poem “Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier California, 1967.” I’m so fond of the poem for how it negotiates the ethics of representation, how one oughtn’t—it seems to say—make images of people, photographic or poetic, or at the very least, how one might be thoughtful and responsible when one does.
The title of your book is echoed in the final poem. We talked earlier about where you see yourself fitting into the conversation this title seems to be engaged in. At the end of the day, where do you find yourself ? With Marlow and Delanty, or Raleigh and Williams?
I’m inclined to say I’m in the Raleigh and William Carlos Williams camp. Poor Marlowe. What’s more interesting than merely taking sides, I think, is understanding how and why the passionate shepherd exaggerates, or deceives. It’s not useful to speculate, and we won’t know, but in the shepherd’s dramatic voice there must be some sense of objective. He’s wooing (since seducing is too strong a word) and is inclined therefore to deceive the nymph and ultimately to deceive himself. He’s ‘passionate’ i.e., suffering. It’s an interesting character whose mistruths are allowed to be seen so obviously. Anne Carson has a great line in Nox about “a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding”. It’s how conceits work, and a convention of the elegy too: the poem that on one hand is desperate to frankly and directly address grief, and on the other can’t bear to confront the fact of it. Nevertheless, I have sympathy for the man.
Contributor Notes
Stephen Sexton’s debut full-length book If All the World and Love Were Young was published by Penguin in August 2019. He is also and the author of a pamphlet of poems, Oils, published by the Emma Press in 2014, which was the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Pamphlet Choice of that year. His work has been published in leading journals in the UK and Ireland such as Granta, Poetry London and Poetry Ireland Review, as well as a number of American publications such as Poetry and The Virginia Quarterly Review. His poems were featured in The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland, edited by Sinéad Morrissey and Stephen Connolly and appear in Switching Off Darkness: Young Irish Poets (an anthology of poems by Irish writers in Greek translation) published by Vakxikon Publications in 2019. He has contributed to documentaries for BBC Radio Four, including “We Will Arise and Go Now” and “Driving Bill Drummond”. Sexton was also the winner of the UK National Poetry Competition and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.
About the author
Steven Blythe received his degrees in Creative Writing and Philosophy from Georgia State University in 1998. He has been published in literary journals in the U.S. and abroad. He retired from the U.S. Coast Guard in 2009 after deployments to Antarctica, Umm Qasr, and Haiti. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota.