Who will protect us from poetry’s protectors?

I don’t know how you whippersnappers reel off your blogs so quickly, so I arrive at the pitchfork party for Nathan A Thompson a little late. Earlier, a wave of virtual sabers were shaken throughout the twittersphere after Thompson’s ill informed and reference free diatribe against Slam appeared in today’s Independent. Most of us started [...]

Missive 27/11/12

The change of season has finally elicited a bit of a cleanup of this website. Gone are the hominid skulls and primate portraits; the multimedia section has been replaced by sidebar feeds for my Youtube and SoundCloud accounts; the yellow typewritten logo has been crushed into a ball and bounced off the outside rim of [...]

Video: Keats House gig, November 2010

This gig was recorded at Keats House on the 7th November 2010. Introduced by Raymond Antrobus. Featuring many sonnets that I had professionally memorised that morning. Was a lovely experience soaking up the vibes in Keats’ bedroom before doing my set. You can watch it in 720p here. 1. Route 68 Walworth Road 2. by [...]

Sonnet Hack – Day Sixteen

The Last Neanderthal’s Last Night on Earth Such things he’s seen, although his sight is blurred, the memories sharpen as the vision dims: the mammoth’s death, the final batch of skins, the scent of meat, the song about the hearth… His last meal was a flapping, wounded bird— slammed into the rocks by sudden winds— [...]

Sonnet Hack – Day Fifteen

On Looking for a Snow Leopard and not Finding One We find our plot, a Himalayan stretch, the beaming white, the rippled scars of grey and, Guru-still, initiate our watch: wipe the mind and calibrate the gaze. The markhor bump and grind their clanging skulls, It could be Croydon on a Friday night, the quarry, [...]

Sonnet Hack – Day Eight

“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 [...]

Niall O’Sullivan—Sonnet Hack!

Belated apologies for the lack of recent new content. Marriage, honeymoon, a return to Wimbledon, Latitude and laziness have conspired to keep me from my dedicated shedful of followers. However, that is about to change. For the whole month of September, I am going to be your sonnet hack. That’s right, I will be posting [...]

Todd Moore 14/11/1937 – 12/3/2010

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 [...]

Return to the Source

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.

No Time for Poetry?

This week at Unplugged we had a little film crew down from UCA Farnham, students making a film about the UK poetry scene. They showed up, weren’t overstaffed, didn’t mess with the lighting and generally proved themselves to be more professional than most of the film crews we’ve had down. I’m wary around cameras and [...]