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For large parts of my growing up in the 1990s, I was two people at once, or one person in two worlds. There’s a fundamental two-ness to the book: me and Mario adulthood and childhood (or bigness and smallness, depending on the mushrooms) real landscapes and those in the video game. Elegy started to creep into this digital world too: I couldn’t describe a representation of a house and its tree of berries in the game without describing our house and its holly tree. When I started working on the project in earnest, it quickly became clear to me that I couldn’t interrogate these worlds without thinking about my childhood, and I couldn’t think about my childhood without thinking about my mother. Why not, I thought, devote one’s powers of observation and one’s intensity of gaze not at Waterhouse or Moreau, but at the image of an Italian plumber and his brother and their fantastical worlds. I say it was a joke, because the tradition of poems after paintings – or ekphrasis, to be Greek about it – has a certain classical air to it a seriousness. As a kind of joke, I figured I’d write a poem for every level of Super Mario World, harnessing the urge towards completeness so deeply felt by many players of video games.
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I’m fascinated by how verbal and visual signs correspond, but I grew a little bored of writing poems after paintings. I was a PhD student at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, producing work which considered the interaction of poems and images. I started writing what would become If All the World and Love Were Young almost two decades later, in the summer of 2015, three years after my mother died. Stephen Sexton: An adult might notice the almost-donut shape of the North of Ireland, Lough Neagh its missing middle Now that I think about it, it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that for me, death and Super Mario have always been connected. Even now I can summon from somewhere in my DNA that sheer, cardiac joy. One Friday evening, my mother came to pick us up in her red Vauxhall Corsa with a big, mostly yellow box with a black L-shaped panel on it, and, in red, the words “Super Nintendo”. Our zeal must have been palpable, or else our parents talked to each other in the way I imagine parents still talk. We must have talked about Mario or itched to get back to him. Both of us developed an enthusiasm for the adventures of Mario and his brother Luigi, and one could imagine why: another world of time and space and colour and ecology beyond the containment of a relative stranger’s house in semi-rural County Down. We stayed indoors mostly, since the household owned a Nintendo (or Famicom, as it’s known in Japan: Family Computer). Space was different too: even a few streets beyond the confines of the cul-de-sac felt like another parish entirely, one directed by slightly tougher, slightly older boys, one of whom once produced from his pocket – like an off-brand magician – a dead field mouse. Time operated in the way I imagine time still operates for children: syrupy and capacious. After our grandmother died in 1995, and we no longer had a babysitter to look after us, me and my brother spent afternoons after school, and entire summers, it felt, under the wing of a childminder while our parents went to work. I remember distinctly the day the Super Nintendo arrived, but little about the season except that it was a bright day, and I have to guess at 1996 or 1997 as the year.