How a Poem About a Video Game Expanded One Writer's Definition of Poetry
Elspeth Wilson on Hera Lindsay Bird, Minecraft, and the poetry of our daily lives.
You’re reading a guest post on PopPoetry by Elspeth Wilson. Elspeth is a writer, facilitator, and mentor from the UK. She is the co-founder of the Writing Happiness Project. You can follow her at @ellijwilson on Twitter and @elspethwrites on Instagram.
Poetry was in my life growing up—I just didn’t recognize it. Sure, I studied poems like “To His Coy Mistress” and “My Last Duchess” and was instructed by teachers on their meanings so that I could do well in my English exams. I even loved some of the poems we read, like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 and W. H. Auden’s “Stop All the Clocks,” but they felt like something that existed separately from me, something special and distant and different from me the everyday. If you’d asked me back then where poetry came from, I’d have said that it came from somewhere grand and unrecognizable and certainly not from me, my life, or anyone I knew.
But poetry happened at home, in a small study—more of a glorified cupboard, really— that sat at the end of our living room and housed the family computer. I didn’t get a laptop until I was almost an adult, so this second-hand, chunky old Apple was my primary conduit to the internet, media, and games. It was where I expanded my creativity, found out more about myself, and made up countless stories. It was there that I sowed the seed for what would become my first poetry pamphlet, a constant source of inspiration, and a tool to think with. It was there that I first started playing The Sims.
In poetry in places tiny, dusty studies or the Sims. Places that were popular and well-loved. Poetry supposedly came from the esoteric, the niche, the untouchable. So, when I fashioned characters and told my (long-suffering) parents the narratives of my Sims’ lives and experimented with different virtual identities, I didn’t recognize that as creativity. I didn’t recognize it as the spark of something. I didn’t recognize it as something worthy of poetry or art—or that it might even be those things itself.
It was when I read Hera Lindsay Bird’s Poem “I knew I loved you when you showed me your Minecraft world” that the poetry of my interest truly unfurled for me.
Even when my daily obsession with The Sims started to wane, I still felt a huge fondness for it. I could see the ways in which it had allowed me to explore aspects of myself, like being bi, and how it had fostered my interest in exploration and other worlds. In my twenties, I’d also started to write about The Sims occasionally, trying to figure out what about that virtual world, in particular, had captivated me to such an extent. But it was when I read Hera Lindsay Bird’s Poem “I knew I loved you when you showed me your Minecraft world” that the poetry of my interest truly unfurled for me.
Bird’s poem unashamedly positions games as something worth writing poetry about, something that intersects with love and yearning and protectiveness and sorrow and all the things that fuel great poems.
The poem concerns a tender moment when the speaker is let into a precious world that their lover has worked hard to cultivate—it just happens to be a world created in Minecraft. The intimacy of showing someone the place you come to escape, to relax, to enjoy, and that you have invested time and energy in is brought alive in Bird’s work, as is the responsibility this evokes in the person who is being given the tour. It’s almost painful to read how much this act ignites in the viewer, how much it emphasizes all the soft points and beauty of their lover.
Bird doesn’t waste time dancing around the question of how to write about the natural and the virtual together—the poem just grips Minecraft with both hands and squeezes out all its gorgeousness.
One of the things that impacted me most on my first reading of the poem and every reading since is that the Minecraft world and our world are not positioned as totally or even mostly separate. Indeed, they feed into each other and overlap at times, which chimes with my own experience of having a true love for a game. Through this approach, Bird incorporates nature writing into her depiction of the world, as she does in one of my favorite lines: “spring is on the wind like wifi.”
Bird doesn’t waste time dancing around the question of how to write about the natural and the virtual together—the poem just grips Minecraft with both hands and squeezes out all its gorgeousness. There’s no pussyfooting. Bird showed me that poetry is not an exclusive art; it does not require us to depart from our daily lives to find ways to discuss our deepest loves and our deepest fears. In fact, that’s exactly where poetry lies: in the magic of mundanity, the eeriness of the every day, and in lines such as these:
walk me to the graveyard on the edge of your map nothing must hurt you, not even me
The poem contains a strong hinterland; it allows us to imagine the pasts of these lovers and all the other worlds they inhabit, too. By allowing us to hook into one world, writing about games can open gateways into many others. The Sims isn’t only my joy; it’s my reflection, my muse, my path through. I just wish that I’d known at school that poetry could be this fun, this searching, this captivating. Bird treats the Minecraft world seriously while also holding it lightly. This poem is proof that anything you treat as worthy of poetry will automatically become such.
Games are good to think with. They are good to feel with. Like all forms of art and play, they can contain poetry, be poetry, and inspire poetry. Poetry must by necessity be open to other worlds, other sights, and other experiences. And for many of us, those exist in places with “the dark pixels of the forest” that Bird describes.
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