Super Mario World poetry author on the link between poetry and gamers

Nintendo Life: How did the idea for If All the World and Love Were Young come about?

I started it by accident. As part of a Creative Writing PhD project, I was writing poems responding to paintings or photographs and I became increasingly bored. In a fit of mischief, I thought, why not take a familiar image instead of a classical one?

Out of nowhere, really, came Super Mario World’s landscapes. It’s my favourite game, and I think the most perfect. I started to write a poem for every level, from Yoshi’s Island to the Forest of Illusion, treating them as real places. Partway in, I felt more and more drawn to the memories of playing, in my house in the countryside, looking out the window into the ‘real’ world. My mother was still alive then (she died in 2012), and the longer I thought about my childhood, the more I thought about her. Suddenly, I was writing a book about grief – something buried so deeply I had to trick myself into writing about it.

Have you found there’s much overlap between poetry readers and Mario players?

There have been people who may not read poetry who came to the book for the Mario. But it doesn’t surprise me that people who like video games might like poetry, or literature more broadly. Sometimes, people who don’t understand video games think it’s a passive experience, that one sits before a screen doing nothing. What we know is the video game can be a deeply engaging, imaginative experience: players are inventive and curious, able to interpret signs and symbols. These are the skills poetry readers have too.