Niall O'Sullivan – Poet

the gaps, the silence Pity the poor ape that stares upwards from the crust of his round gravity well to view the universe expanding outwards, the silent toll of its own heat-death knell, and seeks to find another mind behind it, a mind that happens to be quite like ours; a finger snap from which [...]

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 [...]

Richard Dawkins coined a fantastic phrase in The Ancestor’s Tale: the discontinuous mind. The discontinuous mind is a kind of binary way of viewing the world, the non-realisation that many boundaries and watersheds exist for legal and bureaucratic convenience, they do not really reflect a substantial change in the real world. The discontinuous mind believes [...]

So the basic plan for the year ahead is this. To finally shake off my ring rust and get to serious work on a long sequence of poems about human evolution. So far I’ve written about ten, though some of these are quite long and made up of many parts. However, now is the time [...]