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 […]

Here’s a rare sight indeed: a discussion of poetic form and its effects (or lack of them) on Twitter/X: It’s a source of frustration to me that you’re only likely to see such exchanges in the wake of a spat or controversy, as in this case. I don’t agree that social media, as a forum, […]

I’m using this poem in an MA class this week – offering it, perhaps unfairly, as the archetypal literary sequence in miniature. I don’t think that’s what it set out to be; the title is punning on ‘quince’ and the whole thing is obviously an extension of that joke (15 lines in total; ‘quince’ is […]

Note: this post is duplicated from my Substack, Stray Bulletin. The year’s nearly done, so here is the first of two planned posts picking out some highlights from all that I haven’t found time to blog about over the last six months. Creels and rockpools Although I’ve made a start on countless digital ‘ludokinetic’ poems, hardly […]