Niall O'Sullivan – Poet

“Three-dimensional stop-motion model animation created a fantasy world that was so rare. The way the creatures moved encouraged a sense that one was watching a miracle, but when the miracle becomes commonplace, the concept of the miracles ceases to be miraculous.” -Ray Harryhausen For the Master I learned to dream on Bank Holiday Mondays, when [...]

Ross Sutherland has thrown out a commission for poets to make their own version of the wonderfully abysmal “Last Barman Poet” poem, recited by Tom Cruise in the barman buddy flick, Cocktail. Please take a moment to watch the above through tiny slits between your fingers. You can find other examples at the project website: [...]

I had the honour of hanging out with Todd Moore for a couple of days when he came over to London a few years back. All I really knew of Todd Moore was from the terse Dillinger vignettes that appeared regularly in Tim Wells’s Rising magazine. The poems seemed to scan the contents of a moment, much [...]

I think that there is something more to memorizing a poem than helping out performance, I think that there is something natural about it, something wedded to poetry as a natural product of the human mind, something wedded to the poem’s natural history. Memorising a poem is in some ways more of a completion of a poem than the publication, it is a return to the source.

I’ve blogged on this subject elsewhere, and ranted about it a few times on stage, so please forgive me if I repeat myself now. I think that the current advertising campaign for Barclaycard is perhaps one of the most deceptively honest expressions of the current financial crisis. Like many people, I just enjoyed the fun [...]

I might have never finished my degree in Fine Art ( live the cliché!) all those years back, but I’ve got that bit closer to being exhibited by the Tate than my fellow ponces. That’s right, yours truly has written the Poem of the Month on the Tate’s magazine website. The poem is based on [...]

For anyone that didn’t make it, here’s an video of my set at Utter! Evolution a few nights back, click on the “facebook” icon in the top right hand corner to watch it in HD. It was a quality night, with great performances by Baba Brinkman and Kelly Swain. Big kudos is due to Charlie [...]

Tomorrow night I will be performing some of my Palaeoanthropological poetry at Utter Evolution at the Cross Kings in King’s Cross. I’ll be reading first, probably round 7.50, so get there early for that reason but also because the door charge jumps from £5 to £10 at the stroke of 7.30. Details below: Thurs 15th [...]

Sometimes I find myself muting my praise for Richard Dawkins. In the Guardian-reading, liberal, accommodating, live-and-let-live atmosphere of the London literary scene, standing up and telling whole groups of people that they’re wrong about things seems terribly improper. Most of the poets and writers I run into these days are atheists and agnostics, but they [...]

I could never get past the notion that I was watching Depp, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that I was watching a Dillinger movie with a missing vital ingredient. Dillinger. After about twenty minutes I was able to accept that I was watching Deppinger and move on.