Hello and welcome back to Words that Burn the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. I’ve taken a very long break over the Christmas period but I’m back now and this week we’ll be taking a look at the phenomenal poem Outrageous by Stephen Sexton.
Ekphrasis is a form of poetry that seeks to describe other works of art. Works of an ekphrastic nature, apart from sounding wonderful, seek to capture the beauty of visual art in some kind of linguistic form.1 They are often about paintings, sculpture or dance but they can range to just about anything; to quote literary critic James A.W. Heffernan ‘’ekphrasis is the verbal representation of graphic representation.’’.2 Stephen Sexton has created a ekphrastic masterwork of something not often chosen as the subject of the style: Video games.
This poem, and indeed the collection it comes from If all the world and love were young, is a love letter to the classic Nintendo game Super Mario World.3
Each level of the game becomes the subject of one of the poems in the collection. The reader takes the same journey any player of the game would. Sexton moves us through the Super Mario world on technicolor landscape at a time.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Super Mario seems an unusual choice for such a long and intense homage but in the hands of a poet like Sexton it becomes a powerful vehicle through which to explore one of life’s most difficult topics; Grief.
In 2012, Sexton unfortunately lost his mother to cancer and so this collection becomes an exploration of the time before, during and after this event. When explaining why he chose to tackle such a serious issue from such a unique angle Sexton explained that he found that using an idealized fictional world, like that of Super Mario, as a kind of investigative tool with which to highlight the more stark parts of reality. He is quoted as saying: ‘’ I guess I’m mapping that onto Super Mario as an alternative place. As an idealized childhood-safety kind of thing.’’4
Using that premise Sexton fuses memory, nostalgia, loss and childhood together into a testament to the times he spent with his mother.
Sexton has always had a talent for the surreal in his work. Eavan Boland once praised him highly, stating: ’His work is distinctive amongst the poets of his generation for its occasional but sure-footed navigation of the surreal.’’5
This praise came early in his career and if it was occasional then, it is near constant now and plied with absolute confidence. The poet seamlessly melds the landscapes of Super Mario World with scenes from his own memory and time growing up with Northern Ireland and abroad.
These images slip fluidly between one another, leaving the reader in a state of uncertainty as to whether or not the video game is being dealt with or reality itself.
Upon analyzing Outrageous for the first time I genuinely thought that Sexton and dropped the premise of his book towards the end poems and simply chose to write referencing the real world. I had to eat crow when I watched a playthrough on youtube of the level question and found it full of trees and bullets, or in this case bullet bills, as the poem itself. Indeed towards the end of this poem the fusion of two states of being becomes so complete that each poem seems realist in it’s content. An astounding achievement in my opinion. I’ve included a link to that same playthrough below if you’d like to check it out for yourself.
That sense of fused realities goes one step further when you take into account how Sexton has chosen to structure the poems of the collection. There is a clue hidden in the first pages of the book; Sexton explains that; The Super Nintendo is a 16-bit Console. Put simply, 16-bit refers to how much memory the system can process at one time.6 Each line of the poem is written with 16 syllables in them, a clever nod to how much of Sexton's own memory can be processed at a time. Each poem also has the rough appearance of a square to mimic the shape of a pixel. As the poet put it himself: ‘’I felt like it wasn’t enough just to describe the images that were on the screen, I needed to find a way to approximate the feeling or the experience of playing it.’’7
This is ekphrasis on another level, if you’ll excuse the pun.
As I said, as the poem goes on the line between Mario and memory blurs, emotions become transferable from the speaker to other avatars. Outrageous is situated towards the end of the book after the death of the author's mother, naturally grief is its primary theme. It showcases a world with a little less spark in it now, one the author never thought would be cold. He makes it clear from the opening section:
There is an immediate sense of loss at the end of summer. It is the close of warmer times, commonly associated with sun and enjoyment. More importantly summer is often associated with childhood and coming of age.8 In this instance it is possibly and unfortunately the end of the speaker’s childhood at the same time. The sting of this is made all the more unbearable in the word suddenly. Naturally, with colder days looming, fires are turned to. There is a sense of futility in this one however, as it only produces puffed out embers, that are so fleeting they may as well never have happened. There are myriad ways to interpret this image. It could be the poet's reflection on the fleeting nature of existence, it might symbolize the sheer loss of hope for him. Or it may, as many of the other poems do, simply show the glimpses of memory and warmth that are in a constant state of change.
The last two words are incredibly final: soon extinguished and we are left in little doubt as to the meaning then.
As you might have guessed this allusion to fire also has strong ties to the video game level. As Mario, and the player themselves traverse the level little balls of fire roll around the forest floor, threaten to do harm constantly. Some of the iconic Piranha plants of Mario's world, cast our tiny flickering fireballs that are in turn soon extinguished. Right from the beginning both worlds are inseparable.
From there the imagery of undoing takes hold:
Now deterioration is settling in, like the soot on the hearth. Firewood is seen destroyed and even symbols that the speaker had once considered mighty; the tree tallest in the forest
has been struck down, lightning felled.. Nothing is permanent, nothing sacred.
In the face of such destruction our speaker retreats to a forest behind their childhood home. The forest is also the setting of the level in the game, filled with trees that tower above Mario, complete with digital leaves occasionally falling across the screen.
We can see in the use of words like frolicked and tramped that there are still some glimmers of childhood left behind. They are soon stamped out though, when they realize that the place they though no one else had ever seen before has been disturbed. This shock to the speaker is another subtle reference to the game. The final levels of Super Mario World are located in the special world, a hidden location on the map.9 Naturally any young player who might find themselves there would consider it a secret that few knew.
This would come as quite a blow, as the next few lines attest:
Not only is the speaker mistaken in how unknown this place is, but they are now faced with a spoiled place, one filled with remnants of a hunting party; their cold leavings. This a resurgence of Northern Irish imagery to the poem as Sexton lists a collection of artifacts commonly associated with fox hunting, an activity that is still legal there.10 This could be seen as a further bow to childhood innocence, another painful moment of leaving naiveté behind. The imagery of hunting certainly matches that of destruction and undoing seen earlier in the poem.
Again Super Mario world subtly infused into the imagery being used here. The casings are a reference to the classic enemy type Bullet Bill, who are littered all over the Outrageous level.
The rusting cans are a little more abstract a reference but I’m fairly certain they reference the iconic Mario plumbing tubes, which are coloured a rusty orange in this case. If you’d like a better sense of the world and the characters inhabiting it, I’ve included a link to the original instruction booklet below in the description.
Sexton’s extreme skill in fluid imagery takes over in the following two lines as he describes a field disturbed by a noisy moon, this is an obscure way of reference how moonlight hangs in slivers on blades of grass. He then lends that image to a new one, that of gunshot lit faces in pursuit of animals.
You may have noticed by now that there is a severe lack of punctuation occurring now with each image leading directly into the next. The first lines of the poem have line breaks that serve to slow the reader's progress in a non intrusive way, now though that flow is unbroken. Much like the use of the 16 syllables and the square format as nods to the game, this rapid fire progression mimics the music of the original level. As it is a Special Zone in the game there is an emphasis on challenge and difficulty. Players have 300 seconds to complete the level,11 as that clock counts down the music intensifies and speeds up leading to an incredible level of tension. This tension is one we feel keenly moving into the next section:
Our speaker is setting a scene in their own minds. Adding even more peril as the quarry is introduced. Some anonymous creature hidden away from the foe above. A sinister quality is given to the labyrinthine trees as they are transformed into pillars, directly paralleling the 16 bit game where trees stretch off the screen and tower over the miniscule Mario.
A true juxtaposition takes place here though. The playful vibrance of Mario, the sense of joy and harmlessness that accompanies the game has been erased by the mention of this hunt, this creature seeking refuge. It’s almost as though reality has started to infect the game in some way. That the merging of both worlds, in the wake of actual tragedy, is tilting heavily in one direction.
There is a sudden stop in the barrage of imagery with the semi colon (:). Speak aloud these words to the tall tree of the ear. This is possibly the most obtuse of the images given to us by Sexton. I’ve taken it to mean that his own ears act as a witness to things. The speaker has in effect become one of the strange trees.
We are returned to the original image of the hearth and the fireplace, Two traditional symbols of the home.12 The pace of the poem slows right down at this point and seems slow and even. The speaker is searching for remnants of the past now, some kind of salvation of that ended summer. The speaker is looking for any trace of his mother in the wake of his death, they are seeking anything that might spark a memory of her or soothe the loss of her.
There is a hopeful image in those final lines, one that stands in sharp contrast to the grief that seems omnipresent towards the end of the collection. It ends on this ultimately hopeful note with the embers breathing some kind of warmth back into the speaker's life, his memory. We don’t know if the room does or doesn’t fill up with warmth, we are only left with the speaker's hope that it might but coming to the end of the collection that’s enough for us as readers.
So why this poem? I think as an artifact if all the world and love were young is simply one of the most effective elegies I’ve ever read. The whole work gives the complex emotions of grief and loss room to be explored. More than that, the unique setting of the super Mario world allows the poet to explore these difficult emotional landscapes in a familiar way. The poet puts it best when in conversation with Irish writer Carlo Gébler:13
That theme of finding your way back from the wilderness is, to me, best exemplified in this poem. It gives hope to many people who have felt lost in that same way and shows them that some day they might find their way back again too.
What did you think of the poem? I’d love to hear what you think. You can get in touch with me in a few different ways. You can check out my website www.wordsthatburnpodcast.com or you can find me on Instagram @wordsthatburnpodcast.
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Next week’s episode will be on the love poems of E.E. Cummings.
This episode was written and produced by Benjamin Collopy, the music in this episode is by Scott Buckley and is used under creative commons license.
The show notes for this episode complete with references to all sources cited can be found below on substack or on the website.
Thank you so much for listening and you’ll hear from me again soon.
James A. W. Heffernan. “Ekphrasis and Representation.” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 297–316. https://doi.org/10.2307/469040.
James A. W. Heffernan. “Ekphrasis and Representation.” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 297–316. https://doi.org/10.2307/469040. 299
Eguchi, Katsuya, Hideki Konno, Toshihiko Nakago, and Shigefumi Hino. “Super Mario World.” Kyoto: Nintendo, 21AD.
Pritchard, Nicholas. “‘I'm in Sympathy That Things Are Lovely but They're Not Forever’: A Conversation with Stephen Sexton, by Nicholas Pritchard.” World Literature Today. World Literature Today, April 2, 2020. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/interviews/im-sympathy-things-are-lovely-theyre-not-forever-conversation-stephen-sexton.
Boland, Eavan. “FEATURED POET: STEPHEN SEXTON.” The Poetry Ireland Review, no. 123 (2017): 84–85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26499356.
Sexton, Stephen. “NOTE.” Introduction. In If All the World and Love Were Young, ii. London, GB: Penguin Books, 2019.
“Stephen Sexton on the Juxtaposition of Poetry and Super Mario.” Penguin Books UK. Penguin Books, April 7, 2020. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/sep/stephen-sexton-interview-super-mario.html#:~:text=In%20these%20poems%20about%20the,the%20necessity%20of%20the%20unreal.
Fox, Alistair. “THE COMING-OF-AGE FILM AS A GENRE: ATTRIBUTES, EVOLUTION, AND FUNCTIONS.” In Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand: Genre, Gender and Adaptation in a National Cinema, 3–15. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1tqxtsn.6.
Super Mario Wiki. “Outrageous.” Super Mario Wiki. Super Mario Wiki, December 3, 2021. https://www.mariowiki.com/Outrageous.
Gough, Andrew. “Fox Hunting Still Legal in the UK? Stormont Vote Rejects Ban in Northern Ireland.” SURGE. SURGE, December 9, 2021. https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/fox-hunting-northern-ireland-rejects-ban.
Super Mario Wiki. “Outrageous.” Super Mario Wiki. Super Mario Wiki, December 3, 2021. https://www.mariowiki.com/Outrageous.
R. S. P. Beekes. Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009, p. 471.
Rooney Prize for Irish Literature: Stephen Sexton & Carlo Gébler. YouTube. Museum of Literature Ireland, 2021.