itch.io

I'd love to!! Let's chat about it when you can

Of course!

So proud of y'all. We'll email you about the publication.

Hi lynchpoet!

Not only did you provide cool poems, you also created a tool for making poetry! That's so cool! I'm super impressed with GLYPHS, even though it took me a second to figure out how to do it. I've never thought to gamify writing in this way, and it's a tool I'm going to use whenever I feel a block. So thanks for this! 

I love that each glyph has its own personality (seriously, this is so charming), and as you keep writing, any train of thought gets derailed as a new one comes in! So many voices, so many different openings. I really love this program. It feels like the glyphs are the ones in control, and I'm just sorta along for the ride.

I also adore the poems you've written. They're so lively. I wish I had more to say right now, and I'll come back and say more later, but presently I'm just in awe at what you've made (both GLYPHS and the poems).

P.S. I'm sorry for the delay, but I'll send you a PDF with comments of your poems soon!

Hi incorrigible! First off thank you SO MUCH for playing so many of these games and giving awesome thorough feedback. You seriously rock and I'm grateful for your presence here. And welcome to your first game jam!

This game was fun once we were finally able to start playing. In hindsight it would have been easier to print and cut the cards, but I just used a deck and had to search the 5 deck PDFs for each card. It was especially tedious because they weren't organized by suite or anything, but we got there eventually! This if anything made me want to quite (just a simple out-of-loop failure that would have been avoided altogether had we just printed to cards). 

I played the 2 player one, and the instructions were unclear (?) at the onset so we ended up both picking a card and revealing it at the same time for the refrain. Our refrain was the very poetic "before through" 😂This made us both laugh and smile, a happy accident of the game. I honestly was impressed with the end result as well — I was a bit skeptical of a coherent poem forming, just because I felt like my hand was more nouns than verbs, but it came out pretty neat:

before through
gender, my mirror
wed honor as
success. object so
one solve(s) rapture

The companion pieces made this feel extremely fleshed out! Not only are they marvelously written, they add a narrative element to it that builds the world for me. I got pulled in. While I've never read Shadowgraphs, now I want to. 

Overall I loved this as a poetic experience, and am very impressed by the ingenuity it must have taken to make. Very well done!

P.S. I don't think I have time to record myself playing the solo on today (before voting closes), but I'm going to try to do it next week, when I have more time!

Hi Maria!

I'm also a filipina so this one hit really close to home. I love the ritual involved (always love incantations) and the revamping of tradition (both in its form and the prayer spoken). This is interactive in a different way than most other games in this jam, which is pretty cool. Nice work!

This is an ingenious little book of  TTRPG poetry-style! I enjoyed the embodied recollection, and the use of the coin and die. I especially liked the instruction to "allow the poem to die after." Great job!

Hey d! 

As with all of your work, I'm astounded by the beauty you bring to the table. It always takes me a second to get over the WOW and get to the meat of it, lol.

I wouldn't necessarily call this game "fun," because (maybe i was just moving hella slow) it was difficult to read (intentionally so) and slow-paced. That said, I think it's a necessary and honorable text-sculpture to honor the "death"/grief of the short story that will never be.

Curiosity was my strongest feeling while moving through these fragments. I wanted more, and knew I'd have to be satiated with what I was given. It left me with a sense of longing and grief that wasn't at all unpleasant. 

I also really enjoyed all the ways you played with structure, linearity, and echo. The echoes were given form, the museum was transfixed in moments, sensations, not images, and I think this piece taught me a bit how to be content with my hunger. Which I think is what you were trying to do, for narrow are the vessels! Thanks for this, d. 

And thanks for joining the Discord! It's been great just chatting with everyone. 

Here's a lil playthrough vid, so you can see live feedback. It actually crashed halfway through so it got cut short, and I apologize for that! But it's already 19 minutes so I figured it was enough.

Hi axoona!

I really appreciate how real and raw this piece is. I feel like you've just let us into your world, as it is, a true and direct account of the self-talk you were going through (that I'm sure we've all been through as well). For that reason, this piece was super relatable (I found myself thinking YUP a lot of the time).

So far as form goes, I loved how you played with lineation, and all the different permutations/extensions of a single line. It reflects the iterative nature of self-talk perfectly.  If we view this as a Twine game, it's not very experimental, but if we view this as a rehashing of a traditional poem, this poem is extremely experimental! 

The way you paced the end too really blew my mind. I feel like you took us on a journey of struggle, self doubt, and eventual reconciliation. The ending totally floored me. Left me with a sense of quietude (doinglessness!) that was really precious and peaceful. Definitely a poem. Thanks so much for sharing.

To respond to your comments, first off I'm stoked you have a community that really fuels you! Pang sounds awesome. Good point about shorter jams, and if/when we do this again maybe it would be best to have a few 3-day jams rather than a continuous multi-month one.  Thanks for the idea! Live jams are great, and I wish jams like those happened more, but I do really like the fact that people all over the world have access to it. Maybe if shuf grows as an organization we can organize things like this! That'd be rad.

Here's a lil vid I made of my playing through it! So you can get live feedback (sorry I read in my head some times and it's just like silent lol)

Hi Xo!

Thanks for sharing this intimate work! I love that you submitted something that isn't for us, and yet it's still a very beautiful and striking piece. The bouquet in space reminds me of a galaxy, and I'm not sure yet what to make of the different rotation speeds of the earth and the skull. Space-time displacements? Functions of relativity? 

I'm not usually a fan of reduced interactivity, but I like how this piece invited me to ponder and slow down, and enjoy something not meant for me. I think this part of the experience intrigued me the most — the looking in on something intimate that's not mine, that I can't truly access. Poetry's forte is sound and symbol, and can exemplify these things in language. This poem (to me) does neither, and instead simply exists as it is; an impressionistic, imagistic poem. It feels different because most poems let you in, some even invite or draw you in, but this is a pristine beauty that I only know as a cusp. Intriguing work.

Thank you for challenging pre-existing notions of poetry, reader/artist relationship, and notions of agency in this piece! I'm going to be thinking about it for a minute. And thanks so much for being active in the Discord! Of course we'll keep it open and active, I hope to be there more once things in my personal life settle down. You rock Xo!!

Here's a little "playthrough" so you can see some live feedback:

Hi Maria!

This is a beautiful collection of poems, and I'm grateful that you've written them. They feel like practices, or rituals, that readers can use to get in touch with visceral parts of life, like the silence of "watching sunlight crawl" or recreating a childhood meal. These all feel very personal, and real, and overwhelmingly soft. I also loved how you read it in the audio version.

So far as marketing goes, we're going to highlight all you writers in our social media accounts (and of course will tag). In general, the audience of poetry is poets, so getting involved with literary organizations in your area is a good place to start. Finding publishers that are doing what you're doing is a good move too, while slowly building your list of publications, readings, features, collaborations, and awards.  I think it's also important to remember that you don't need to find something pre-existing. You can start a poetry collection with your friends, start hosting events, and eventually evolve into something bigger. SEO for your website is also a good thing to look into. There's not much money in poetry to be perfectly blunt, but there's a lot of joy and purpose that can be found in it. Good luck!

I'm going to email you an annotated PDF of this with more specific notes! Thanks for submitting.

This is the best Klingon I can do!

batlh Heghpu' 'e' yIHeq. ghIlDeSten, nuqneH.pagh, joHwI'vaD bIcholtaHvIS. ngoDvam Hoch vI'oghlaHbe'bogh SuvwI' neH.chuSHa'chugh, vaj pa' 'e' luDablaHbe'./ Qorwaghvo' qaja'pu'bogh vIqeltaHvIS, Huch vIneHbej."HIja' 'ej wovwI'pu' 'ej HIjwI'pu'.jIleghqangbe'taHvIS poH neH vIghajbe'. chaq mu'meyDaj tlhIngan SuvwI'/, yabwIj DIvI', HarghtaHvIS.ghu'vam vIDelmeH, mu'mey wIje'laHbe' ghu', 'ej jIHDaq QotchoHtaHvIS muD, vIDelmeH jIjatlhtaHvIS, mu'mey vIDelbogh.'ach mIghchugh je poH vInobnISchugh je. ngaSwI' qoj, SoHvaD ponglIj vIsovchugh, vaj ngaSbogh qoH vISovbej.SoHvaD 'e' vIpIH.naDev chIch ghaH ngeD buSbogh 'e' vIchID.

I used this, because I don't actually know Klingon. The video is not in Klingon because I can't pronounce it! Sorry 

Hi Yohanna! 

Let me begin by saying that I'm so impressed and intrigued by this piece. I absolutely love the play with language and symbol, and the use of emojis (playful, casual) when dealing with such a heavy text. My only want for a bigger screen (there was text I couldn't quite catch). I think you've done a great job at re-glyph-ing the language/orthographies, distilling them again to sound and image. Well done!

Here's a little playthrough I did so that you can see live reaction:

Hey lynchpoet, 

This is an absolutely amazing piece of art.  I love the super villain and the scroll mechanic, though sometimes the "jump" to the next poem would be a bit jarring. So far as the scrolling pace in the "Technology Zooms Ahead" section, I like the taunt that is being made (the reader/player must work "harder" by scrolling more, though at some point I began to wonder if it was just my laptop not being able to handle it.

I really love how you play with proximity, dimensionality, and spatiality in this piece, and think some sonic texture (voices getting nearer or farer (louder or softer) based on scroll, echoes, etc) would be a lovely addition. That said, this piece is strong in and of itself! The form feels very intentional and appropriate for the content (detached observation), and the scrutiny of truly horrific acts through a glass screen. 

I've attached a playthrough I made so you could get some live feedback :) Please let me know if we can help in any other way!

Hi y'all!

I posted my jam shufPoetry Experimental Poetry Jam five days ago, and it still hasn't been put onto the Calendar yet. Does it normally take this long? When I look at other people who have asked similar questions, I see that it usually takes a few days. I wanted to wait a few more because of the weekend/holiday, but now I'm just wondering if five days is normal, or if my jam somehow fell through the cracks. 

Thanks for your help!

This is our first jam EVER! Thank you so much for being here. 

Learn more about shufPoetry here: shufpoetry.com

Please let us know if there's anything we can do to make this jam experience better for you. We're so excited to jam with you!