I went to see Rashomon at the cinema for my birthday last month, and it reminded me that I published a Toshiro Mifune poem in The Rialto 80 going on a decade ago. So I dug it out and rejigged it, trying to get an anagram of ‘oni’ onto the end of two thirds of the lines: A text-only […]

This is from Standard Midland (Bloodaxe, 2010), picked up in Scarthin Books. Echoes of the 1940 apocalypse poets here — but interesting that the ashen landscape is behind him, seen in a reflection, as if the end of everything has already been and gone.

This is an extract from Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games. When that book was in its draft state, as a doctoral exegesis, I was advised to include a short definition of poetry early on. I found the ‘short’ part close to impossible, so ended up producing the following. In his Poetics, […]

Note: this post is a duplication from my substack, Stray Bulletin. Out picking up ingredients for Christmas dinner, I made a last-minute impulse buy: a pair of blind-bagged Dungeons and Dragons Lego minifigs for me and my partner to crack open alongside our other presents. I’ve a soft spot for ‘what’s in the box’ toys, especially when […]

Recently I published my first short article in The Conversation, the title of which is the same as the title of this post! It’s a very swift account of much of the same ground I cover in Dual Wield, but with mention of some more recent artefacts: Calum Rodger’s ‘Gotta Eat the Plums! with William […]

I have a new poem published in Magma 89: Performance — and for the first time ever (I think) I’m named on the cover! Magma is a long-running, elegantly produced poetry journal which rotates its editors with every themed instalment, ensuring a wider-than-normal range of content from issue to issue. I co-edited number 64, Risk, […]

I’m on the shortlist for the New Media Writing Prize — the only poem, I think, though digital literature tends to blur the line. I recommend playing through the other, varied and brilliant entries. My piece, ‘L and the Empress of Sand’, is a new, single-player version of a performance piece I originally wrote for […]

Why do artists feel threatened by AI? Loss of income on the one hand; on the other, the fear that art as a medium of communication — as a testament to subjective human experience and the reach of the individual human imagination — will be replaced by art as mood lighting, as mechanism, as a […]

On Tuesday, I attended ‘Making A.I. work for writers’, part of a series of workshops organised by ARU’s A.I. working group, in collaboration with my own Cambridge Writing Centre. The emphasis here was on Lynda Clark’s concept of A.I. as ‘creative amplification’; that is, as a tool to use in conjunction with one’s own writing […]

Note: this post is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin. A post-January update covering the start of this year and the end of the last one. Dive, dive! My first publication of the year is a short essay called ‘Next time you dive’ (or How to play a poem), published online in The Friday Poem. It’s a follow-up […]