From Wordsworth to Grand Theft Auto V: the unexpected crossover between poetry and videogames

By Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

God, what the fuck am I doing? / Rock, Star, North / It is Saturday. I’m thirty. I’m inside when it’s sunny playing / Rock, Star, North / playing Grand Theft Auto V on the PlayStation 3 in / Rock, Star, North / in my flat in Garnethill and my friend just called to say / Rock, Star, North / to say he’s in the park and I should come they’ve got the slackline they’ve got / Rock, Star, North / they’ve got beers and Robbie’s coming with the barbecue and languistine and / Rock, Star, North / and it hasn’t been this hot since last July you realise Calum it’s been / Rock, Star, North / serious the park is hoaching get off your arse and join us man or / Rock, Star, North…

Extract from Rock, Star, North by Calum Rodger

One summer’s day in 2015, Calum Rodger alighted at Los Santos International Airport and began walking. His objectives: eight mountain peaks in the surrounding countryside, unmarked on Grand Theft Auto V’s minimap but visible in the Lonely Planetstyle guide included with the game’s retail release. As he walked, fending off the occasional cougar, Rodger poured his mind out on paper. He pondered the names of the mountains, distinct among the game’s objects in that each is “like a poem ie they have no function”. He wrote loving asides to his character, “gentle-hearted Trevor, whose sociopathic / ramblings are as a sweet familiar balm / in this feigned and lonely wilderness!” He wrote about GTA as a cultural enterprise, “a Hobbesian liberty of violence / grown in a chrysalis of ironic self-reference / and born in an HD frame”. And he described himself describing the game: “God, what the fuck am I doing? […] It is Saturday. I’m thirty. I’m inside when it’s sunny playing.”

Poet and visual artist James Knight, author of Rites & Passages

Thus the curious origins of Rodger’s performance poem Rock, Star, North –a Romantic travelogue in the tradition of Basho, William Wordsworth and Nan Shepherd, but transported to the environs of Los Santos. It is, as you might have deduced, a project with tongue lodged firmly in cheek – “a high-concept parody,” as Rodger tells us, aimed both at GTA’s “point-scoring, objective-based mentality” and the figure of the poet grandiosely gleaning holy truths from the wilderness. But there’s an earnestness to the poem, too. “That project was a way to subvert or undercut those aspects [of poetry and games] but ultimately to kind of celebrate them,” Rodger says. “What I’m aiming for is something which is at once sublime and ridiculous, or could potentially be either sublime or ridiculous with just a slight shift of perspective.” As such, Rock, Star, North was also a way of playing with Rodger’s own “hard-baked” yet wistful atheism, with GTAV serving as both a catalyst for inspiration and a means of bringing everything back down to earth. It allowed him to roleplay as a mystic, wrestling with the divine in nature, but “with a kind of get-out clause, which is that it’s just a game!”