Written and performed by Abigail Parry and myself for Burns Night 2016 at the Beer Boutique in Putney, with mild guitar accompaniment. (intro) Ground Control to Major Tom,Is there a bard of rustic song?But with a frater-feeling strong, here heave a sigh. Ground Control to Major Tom,Alas, how chang’d the times to come!Should auld acquaintance […]
Category archives: Uncategorised
Jon Stone: “Died 30 March 1997“
I now have an artist page on the BBC website. It says I died 18 years ago. I don’t believe I was consulted on this.More encouragingly though, they have recordings of five of my poems!
CONTROL ROOM, GameCity, Interactive Poetry
I made ‘Wounding Blisses’, an interactive poem/analogue fighting game, for CONTROL ROOM, an event I co-organised with Abigail Parry for the GameCity festival in Nottingham.Before I expand on that short paragraph, a little personal history: between the ages of 12 and 15 (estimated) I wrote and drew detailed plans for a number of different games […]
The Birdbook series, and Sidekick Books in general
‘Nightjar’, which won last year’s Poetry London competition (see this post) is included in the new Sidekick Books anthology Birdbook: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland.Also included is an accompanying illustration of a nightjar, the style of which is based on World War 2 dazzle ship camouflage.My thanks to the editors of the book, Kirsten Irving and […]
BBC Proms Extra
Last month I was on the Proms Extra bill, performing alongside the John Garner Quartet, a roving band of dexterous young jazz musicians. We were up at the Albert Hall, in the Elgar Room, doing a one-hour set just after the main Proms performance. This was subsequently edited down to a 45-minute radio show, which […]
Prac Crit & Beatrice Garland
A reminder to myself that I also do critical writing! A short close reading of ‘The Academy of New Words’ by Beatrice Garland appears in the latest edition of Prac Crit, a rather slickly rendered online journal of poetry and criticism with a separate viewing pane for the subject of the critique alongside the critique […]
New Boots & Pantisocracies
I find it incredibly, incredibly difficult to write knowingly political poems. I’ve been trying for years. The reason it’s difficult, putting it simply, is that my approach to poetry is to feel my way forward, whereas my approach to politics is to reason my way forward, and it all gets a bit oil and water.The […]
BEAR INTERVENTION! / Lives Beyond Us
Lives Beyond Us is the first big Sidekick Books anthology/treasury without my name on the cover. The editors this time around are my Sidekick teammate Kirsty, who curated and edited the poems, and PhD film scholar Sebastian Manley, who commissioned and edited essays for the book.I do, however, have an essay published in it. An essay […]
Emergency Action
I was saving up this poem to send somewhere, perhaps, one day, somehow, potentially, but in light of Craig Raine’s excruciating performance in the LRB this week, I’m publishing it online now: CRAIG REALLY WANTS YOU TO KNOW where his hands have been. Picture that part – that inlet or islet that only you know, […]
Giant Strange @ Roulade #2
Roulade is Wayne Holloway-Smith and Llew Watkins’ one-night-only live walk-through magazine, and for the second issue (theme: Hubris) they had me round up a team of poets to create giant concrete poems in the shape of kaiju from the Godzilla and Gamera franchises.I’m going to say that again in bold caps. GIANT CONCRETE POEMS IN […]