@benwilko85.bsky.social
Writer, poet, “refreshingly honest” critic, tutor. Poems: Way More Than Luck (2018), Same Difference (Seren Books 2022). Criticism: Don Paterson (LUP 2021). Writing has appeared in Guardian, New Statesman, Spectator, TLS, etc. Liverpool fan. Likes a jog.
Very grateful to have been offered Arts Council England funding to develop my creative practice towards a sustained work of narrative nonfiction. Running For My Life will be a meditative, discursive memoir that explores distance running, mental health, literature and creativity.
03.08.2025 20:16 — 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 0
This is not caused primarily by "screen time".
It's been caused by the mass eradication of third places for young people in basically every city over the past three decades - and a society that's hostile to the concept of teens socialising in public spaces.
www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...
Very grateful to have been offered Arts Council England funding to develop my creative practice towards a sustained work of narrative nonfiction. Running For My Life will be a meditative, discursive memoir that explores distance running, mental health, literature and creativity.
03.08.2025 20:16 — 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 0
The Lionesses have again proven an inspiration to the entire nation. Such joy and resilience, collective spirit and sheer determination. To achieve one of the pinnacles of your sport in back to back tournaments. If you’re not full of admiration for this group, check for a pulse. ❤️
28.07.2025 08:41 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0They are upset because swathes of the media further a political scapegoating agenda; they have been had by constant fear-mongering stories about ‘small boats’. The alternative, as with allowing legit protest over the Gaza genocide, would be for this and prior governments to accept their failures.
24.07.2025 13:41 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Over 1 in 4 women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime and violence towards women is overwhelmingly committed by current and former partners and husbands (source: UN), so the odd asylum seeker is really not the problem, and demonstrably a statistical minority.
24.07.2025 06:09 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Michelle Agyemang, an 18-year-old striker for Arsenal Women and the Lionesses, has lit up the Women’s Euros 2025 with her quiet confidence, excellent hold up play, and calmness in from of goal.
Football without Agyemang is nothing.
23.07.2025 13:23 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0We should have listened when the modems screamed at us.
22.07.2025 14:30 — 👍 11372 🔁 2546 💬 122 📌 90
Héctor Bellerín knows the score. We need more male footballers setting this example for young men.
www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...
A bus shelter advertising Nice Jazz Fest, in Nice, France
Louis Balfour from the Fast Show’s Jazz Club
15.07.2025 11:44 — 👍 42 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0
Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.
13.07.2025 10:19 — 👍 4060 🔁 1125 💬 214 📌 286
Nothing But The Poem – Mick Imlah
In this podcast, @samueltongue.bsky.social & the @byleaveswelive.bsky.social Friends Group look at two poems by Mick Imlah – “Iona” & “London Scottish”. Both can be found on the SPL website.
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/podcast/noth...
‘I believe that damaging and destroying weapons of war is one way of waging peace: I can only conclude that for the British government, the waging of peace is terrorism.’
Huw Lemmey on Palestine Action.
Online early from our next issue.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
The Poetry Review reviewed, Anna Kavan’s art, Christopher Priest in Ramsgate
A riposte on your website is all well and good, but with nicknames like Moth and Ra, I don’t understand why The Salt Path two don’t just smite all their doubters by taking to the skies and shooting down laser beams.
10.07.2025 19:07 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
It seems my essay for @northseapoets.bsky.social on the state of poetry reviewing made @thetls.bsky.social’s NB column this week. Crumbs.
10.07.2025 13:34 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Is it practically impossible to be an honest poet-critic today?
A new essay of mine on the decline of reviewing culture, the rise of the poetry prizes, artistic standards and integrity.
Over at the @northseapoets.bsky.social Substack:
northseapoets.substack.com/p/winners-an...
The value of great literature remains its acting as a life-raft in an age when we are discovering just how far out of our depth the flood-tide of technology might carry us. This is the most compelling reason to champion clarity, quiet attention, and exactness.
08.07.2025 14:18 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Ludicrous stuff, but no more so than our brave new age that thinks it’s somehow outgrown evaluative criticism…
08.07.2025 13:57 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Complicit These are the days when no words will do. Such horrors accrue by the phone's blue light constant as the wind tonight rattles through the alleys, a side gate banging to. Rain white in the gutters, the new year's promise a kite flapping in a thunderstorm as you, far with only second-hand knowledge, rewrite these lines, for all the good they'll do. If you're silent you are complicit chirps one, our self-styled moral compass, but certainty belies difficult truths, as if the world were a clear-edged colouring book, not poetry. Outside there is only the wind and the rain and, overhead, not a single star to be seen. - Ben Wilkinson
“These are the days when no words will do.”
‘Complicit’, first published in @thespectator1828.bsky.social (20 April 2024).
The Salt Path’s only redeeming feature was its basis in alleged fact —the fundamental good character of its writer— which lies in tatters now. But the truth is, like so many books rooted in an uncomplicated sense of victimhood, what’s worse is that it is plainly very bad writing.
07.07.2025 13:09 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Black and white image of the Liverpool FC footballer Diogo Jota smiling with the Premier Keague trophy. The winger tragically died in a car accident on 3 July 2025.
Such tragic news. I’ll never forget seeing Diogo Jota score a brilliant brace at Anfield against the Saints in 2021/22. A wonderful footballer, taken far too soon. Deepest sympathies with his family, friends, and team mates. 💔💔💔
03.07.2025 09:37 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Is it practically impossible to be an honest poet-critic today?
A new essay of mine on the decline of reviewing culture, the rise of the poetry prizes, artistic standards and integrity.
Over at the @northseapoets.bsky.social Substack:
northseapoets.substack.com/p/winners-an...
Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic
by Ben Wilkinson
An essay worthy of discussion among poets?
northseapoets.substack.com/p/winners-an...
Important new essay on the death of poetry criticism from Ben Wilkinson - a new guest post up on the north sea poets substack. A must-read:
open.substack.com/pub/northsea...
The emphasis here on social connections is predictable but great to see it being highlighted.
When we talk to people about class – particularly young people - nepotism is always one of the biggest issues. Often THE biggest.
www.93percent.club/thebigstates...
A description of a new post on the North Sea Poets Substack with a black and white photo of a man with glasses and a beard wearing a jumper. There are plants in the background.
New guest post from poet, editor and critic Ben Wilkinson 📰
Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic – Ben Wilkinson on the current state of reviewing culture
Read the full post here: buff.ly/JIQIGvf
#NorthSeaPoets #PoetrySky #PoetryCommunity
Keeping fingers very firmly crossed that today we follow those countries who have already had a serious, adult, political and ethical discourse about death and suicide, free from ignorance, euphemism, and sentimentality. Assisted dying should be a human right.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
a hill I will die on: a new job is “professional news”, not “personal news”, unless you’re also announcing that you’re going to marry your boss
18.06.2025 20:37 — 👍 117 🔁 8 💬 7 📌 0The trigger happy —and often plain wrong— writing editor in Microsoft Word just suggested I change Instapoetry to ‘Antipoetry’. All is forgiven.
15.06.2025 08:57 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
