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

- Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

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 Planet style 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.”

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