WHY DOESN’T IAN MARTIN HAVE A BOOK?
Exploring agency in a gamified world.
EVERYONE IS MY ENEMY (2022)
By IAN MARTIN
Self-published digital .PDF (Free / Name your price here)
YOU ARE A BAD PERSON; PLACES TO HIDE; YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO KEEP THIS UP FOREVER; PUT YOUR BEST FOOT FORWARD AND TRIP DOWN THE STAIRS; EVERYONE IS MY ENEMY. The titles of ALL CAPS aficionado IAN MARTIN’s chapbooks probably offer some hint as to why, after a decade of superb work, they find themselves one of the best poets in Canada without a full-length collection.
It’s not as though MARTIN’s subject matter has been out of step with the times: their work engages with the same absurdity and anhedonia of coming of age on the web 2.0 internet that fueled alt lit and its successors. A survey of early publications by Montreal indie Metatron Press demonstrates how trendy this stuff was in the more cosmopolitan cities of the ‘10s (and how poorly a lot of it has aged), yet MARTIN has opted to remain in Ottawa—a choice that undoubtedly limited their access to the sort of in-person networking that helps a new writer’s manuscript jump the queues of today’s dangerously over-saturated small presses.1 The nation’s capital actually had a very healthy younger writing scene when MARTIN was coming up, but the best of those writers looked not to Brooklyn for their Mecca but to the postmodernism of the ‘70s and ‘80s Canadian avant-garde.2 Almost uniquely among the city’s poets, when MARTIN writes about the experience of being online they don’t sound like your aunt emailing you to explain a thread she read on Bluesky. Still, I suspect that even if MARTIN had moved elsewhere, their stuff might not have quickly found an “in” with a trade publisher anyway. Unlike the majority of the smirking “Oppositional Defiance Disorder in the streets, patronage sub in the sheets” hacks who most benefited from the zeitgeist, MARTIN’s work feels like the result of a deeper alienation that is not so comfortable to absorb and dismiss.
MARTIN’s most recent chapbook to date is 2022’s EVERYONE IS MY ENEMY, a downloadable 35-page .PDF self-released via their website. ENEMY captures as well as any poet has that 3 a.m. dull-ache-behind-the-eyes feeling of having stared too long at a screen, suddenly conscious of the creeping stiffness afflicting your neglected body, the moss on your tongue. MARTIN, who is also a video game developer, uses gaming as a framing device for these poems, but the subjectivity of the speaker floats around: sometimes they’re playing a game; sometimes they’re a character within a game; sometimes their forays into meatspace feel so corrupted by programmatic loops and social glitches that the two experiences become indistinguishable.
At its core, the collection is about agency. While gaming, you are the absolute master of your avatar within the digital world, free of any of the consequences it endures from following your edicts. At the same time, however, your mastery is limited by the framework put in place by the developers, such that the possibilities of your freedom are narrowed down to pressing the same red, raw pleasure button over and over.
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When MARTIN writes from the perspective of NPCs within a gameworld (such as in the three-part “HENCHMAN” cycle excerpted at the top of this post), the characters are driven through endless cycles of slapstick death and resurrection in the pursuit of programmed goals they do not understand. But the human players seem equally ambivalent, as if by the act of playing the game they have accepted its definitions of their wants and needs. Gamification, or the incorporation of progress bars and bullshit tchotchke rewards into everything from dieting to dating to political activism,3 has imported this logic to reality, like a splint around desire that corrects and withers it. MARTIN’s characters often cannot remember why they consented to playing the game, or if there was ever a choice at all:
As anyone who’s read a little Edward Bernays (or watched some Adam Curtis documentaries) can tell you, the game’s lure is baited with the promise of self-actualization. In “OFFENSIVE,” there’s a creep in the quoted keywords from product (“bluetooth car adapter”) to concept (“philosophy”) to the fundaments of expression itself (“words”). To an automated ad platform, no intrinsic hierarchy exists among these interest tags: they are all equal vectors for selling you cosmetic enhancements to the self. It’s difficult to decide when looking at these digitized, miniaturized simulations of human values and motivations whether the insult you feel is because they have been fashioned with such contempt for you, or because the simulation could be accurate.
Either way, opting out has consequences, particularly for those queer people for whom autonomy is a project of constructing a visual identity that matches your interiority. In physical space, and increasingly online, it feels like you have to buy the bullshit to have any control over how you are seen and how you can look; who you can touch and how you can be touched; what you can desire and what others might desire about you.
But games, of course, are famously “escapism,” and one thing that separates MARTIN from many of their cringingly self-censorious peers is that they understand pleasure is amoral. Many of EVERYONE IS MY ENEMY’s poems have something of the meth-y single-mindedness of a resource grinding session; some (like “COSTUME”) treat being Horny in the Gamer Chair as a liberatory experience;4 others fantasize about responding to minor conflicts with hideously disproportionate violence. You know: the stuff that makes gaming great! This sort of comfort with the problematic allows MARTIN’s poems to land some wickedly cheap jokes—and makes the collection’s rare moments of earnest, nostalgic wistfulness feel that much more poignant (“EVERY FEW MONTHS I OPEN MINECRAFT”).
As I poked through MARTIN’s past projects on their website to prepare for this piece, I was reminded (sometimes brutally) how much has changed over the past decade-abouts since they started publishing. (If you think you’re aging poorly, spare a thought for technology’s complexion!) Today’s artist doesn’t need to visit a ruined castle to feel a sense of life’s ephemerality—reading MARTIN’s derelict Twitter bot accounts feels like tripping over an ancient colonnade half-swallowed under grass. But regardless of how much longer it takes for a perfect-bound collection to manifest (or if one ever does), the corpus they’ve already produced is impressive enough. MARTIN’s poetry pushes on the walls of game logic till it collapses into that unstructured, unaccounted for thing known as a glitch. There’s bewilderment and terror in that, but also joy.
As of last summer (I’ve been told) Coach House had already locked in its publishing calendar through 2027; even your average chapbook publisher’s pipeline looks a bit like a snake trying to digest an ostrich egg (though I have it on good authority that Discordia has plenty of openings to not read your MS for eight months to a year).
I don’t think this is ipso facto a bad thing. Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and John Thompson’s Stilt Jack are better works of poetry than anything produced in Williamsburg in the current millennium.
To cite some extremely low-hanging fruit:
“Turning Activism into a Game: Today for Animals is more than just a helping hand. It introduces a fun, game-like element to activism. Each action earns users kudos and a spot on the leaderboard. Completing various animal-friendly tasks also lets users collect beautifully designed badges for their profiles. These include whimsical titles like ‘Nobel Peace Grazer’, ‘Non-Dairy Visionary’, and ‘PhD in Veganometry’. […]
Another exciting aspect of TFA is the daily streak feature. By visiting the app at least once a day, users can keep their streak going. This gamification of activism illustrates that fighting for animal rights can be a daily adventure—especially when you're scrambling to maintain your streak before midnight!”
I like animals and this makes me want to “maintain my streak” of killing cows with a sledgehammer.
Though MARTIN complicates even this by giving this “liberation” an unsettlingly predatory flavour, like a bullied kid realizing the thrill of dominating someone even weaker.