Spelling wool

For: Joan Westenberg https://www.joanwestenberg.com/ Rebecca was the anonymous, eponymous hero/ine of a series of uprisings, “The Rebecca Riots,” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Riots) in West Wales, against the imposition of tolls by landowners over whose lands traditional drovers roads passed. This mixes up pieces of the Internet today: AI, large language models (LLMs), and the “open Web” with The … Continue reading Spelling wool

Reading is less cool than reciting from memory. Of course you all know I am in complete denial about my age, but it is weird, recently I have actually started to feel my brain failing to form short-term memories. The short term is about 5 seconds and then it is like fractals dissolving. I saw … Continue reading Spoken word reading the script?

Retro fitting

A blog post to a sequence of events, of interest here are poetry open mics in Oxford, Birmingham, Bristol, London, Southampton, Chipping Norton, and coming up, Coventry soon. Elsewhere further afield, I aspire to Leeds, Southport, Newcastle, somewhere in Scotland (Dundee?), Barrow? But why? I love hearing people speak verse. A heartless (often) artwork setting … Continue reading Retro fitting

Me me me and me-these-days

Why was doing drugs in semi-public toilets ever liberating? "Me, me, me..." is not what interests, well, me-these-days: reading Max Wallis and Alex Dimitrov.

… and post an old poem, new to this site

I wrote the poem "Total Information Awareness" in 2005. It was published in 2014. I have read it many times at poetry open mics and slams. What we are seeing in 2025, particularly the persecution of migrants, has been in production for more than 20 years. I knew. “We all” had the means by which … Continue reading … and post an old poem, new to this site

Poetry demands utility

I think this will turn out all right if I just come quietly.

I make models, ships in bottles…

These phrases, from a poem of mine (here) begin to articulate my understanding of what art, and poetry as a kind of art-in-words, does. Among other things, art mediates the distance between the moment and the eternal. Art represents the macrocosm in the microcosm, bursting like Michelangelo's Awakening Slave: a moment out of the stone … Continue reading I make models, ships in bottles…

Connections to the great unknown

I walked out humming the chorus to House Carpenter: "Save your love for loneliness, save my love for sorrow..." and said hello to neighbour, Peggy Seeger. In Oxford 2025 it is still just possible to be one degree of separation from Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

Was hit by a one-two of poetry

Was hit by a one-two of #poetry yesterday readin' Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador, London, 2021), a sci-fi novel by Harry Josephine Giles (find their books and more here https://harryjosephine.com/) in trans-linguistic Orkney verse mediating & mediated in nowimmediateurgent language. Boom! And, Martina Evans, "Drunken Driving an extract" (The Stinging Fly 51.2 Winter 2024-25, pp24-33 https://stingingfly.org/magazine/): … Continue reading Was hit by a one-two of poetry

Tag: poetry