Ben Wilkinson

A Government of cowards.

Rather than tackle inequality - they've gone for pensioners, disabled people and now it's people fleeing war and persecution.

They can't get away with this.

Join.greenparty.org.uk

Yup, I expect the PBS couldn’t justify it financially. The original in ‘94 was a collab between them and The Poetry Society; a good pooling of resources. But these are difficult times for arts orgs and charities.

Surviving, ta, even if this long Covid business is really living up to its name…

Dying to Run, Episode 4: "The Always Tired Club" | 80/20 Endurance Matt Fitzgerald has been a runner for almost his entire life, but his running days ended abruptly in 2020 when he developed long COVID, a post-viral chronic

“Another reason I chose to share my experience with long COVID was that I wanted to scare the shit out of people who weren’t taking it seriously. Think you’re too healthy or fit to end up like me?”

Seems I found my new running crew: The Always Tired Club.

www.8020endurance.com/dying-to-run...

I don’t think the promotion ran, which seems a shame. Like prizes, these marketing exercises are what they are, and never perfect. But anything that strives to promote excellence in contemporary poetry beyond the usual bubbles strikes me as valuable.

Only waking up to this now as I’ve spent a chunk of 2024/25 under a rock, but what happened to the Next Generation Poets 2024, i.e. the fourth instalment in the PBS/Poetry Society’s promotional celebration of 20 new voices predicted to dominate British verse in the coming decade?

The politics of despair have engulfed Britain. But Zack Polanski is offering a way out | Owen Jones The leader of the Greens wants to focus on battles that unite – such as taxing wealth – without yielding an inch on minority rights, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

The politics of despair have engulfed Britain. But Zack Polanski is offering a way out | Owen Jones

If reform can rocket through the polls with a politics of despair, then it's time for the green party to do the same thing but with a politics of hope.

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Football is like life: we meet with both triumph and disaster. True character is about treating both the same, with class and dignity.

This new-look team will be special. Patience. Some folks need to check themselves, remember who we are, and who our boys lost over the summer.

Definitely worth paying for to avoid potential complications if you were to catch the virus, but infuriating that it isn’t routinely available to those in various vulnerable categories. I’m properly on the mend now, mercifully, so I feel quite lucky in some ways.

I’ve spent nearly a year and a half recovering from a fairly horrific spell of long Covid, but because it isn’t yet recognised as a medical condition, I had to pay nearly £100 for my recent vaccination.

You know we’re through the looking glass here in the UK when the radical right wing has ties to and defends Putin’s Russia, but tries to accuse the left of ‘communism’ for proposing such moderate conservative views as taxing billionaires and dismantling the rentier economy.

This #WorldMentalHealthDay, a poem that metaphorises one of the many guises in which depression might manifest itself.

‘The Bull’ features in my second collection of poems, 𝑆𝑎𝑚𝑒 𝐷𝑖𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 (Seren Books, 2022).

#MentalHealthMatters

True enough. Recall folks enthusiastically claiming much the same about social media, then we had Cambridge Analytica, Russian bots, Brexit, Trumpism… I haven’t the highest hopes of AI being utilised for particularly noble or edifying ends.

The Faculty Mental Health Fair Has Been Postponed Again Dear Faculty: Due to concerns expressed by the students, parents, and staff, you are invited to attend a mandatory emergency mental health fair in ...

‘“Keeping It Together: How Not to Get So Burned Out That You Walk Out in the Middle of Class” will now be a slideshow presented in the haunted auditorium by Jim “Flip” Philips, head coach of the varsity TP team.’

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

Alan Carr just casually giving Toad of Toad Hall disguised as a washerwoman, escaping gaol in the Wind in the Willows. O Traitors, you’ve only gone and done it again.

#CelebrityTraitors

Why does the Conservative Party hate Shakespeare, the Romantics, the Brontës, and all the world-renowned richness of British literary culture?

Students who study English gain a whole raft of life skills: verbal and written communication; creative and critical thinking.

Totally behind everything Gary Neville says about using flags as a symbol of division and hate, and the need for unity and solidarity.

I’m from an ordinary background, state schooled, and have worked hard all my life. What’s stood in my way has always been been privilege and greed, never diversity.

The Faculty Mental Health Fair Has Been Postponed Again Dear Faculty: Due to concerns expressed by the students, parents, and staff, you are invited to attend a mandatory emergency mental health fair in ...

“Keeping It Together: How Not to Get So Burned Out That You Walk Out in the Middle of Class” will now be a slideshow presented in the haunted auditorium by Jim “Flip” Philips, head coach of the varsity TP team.

Well said, Gary Neville! 👏

Literary prizes are a cheap distraction from the true purpose of reading great books, which is making people who haven't read them feel bad about themselves

Always reassuring when a prize shortlist consists of an appealing mix of established as well as newer voices (the latter poets with one to three collections, by any sensible definition). A new collection by Tom Paulin! I’ve some books to buy and reading to catch up with.

The fact that the first AI actor is an archetypally attractive young woman who cannot and will not object to any cinematic scenario she is placed within says everything about the forces driving these ‘innovations’.

Shipping containers on the waterside at Stourton, two miles south-east of Leeds city centre.

A walk from Leeds to Goole, via the River Aire, the Aire and Calder Navigation, the Knottingley and Goole Canal, the New Junction Canal and the Dutch River, 6.45am to 9.52pm Friday 26 September.

An improvised, illustrated thread of indeterminate length, part reflection, part reconstruction. 1/

If you’ve flu-like symptoms at the moment, test for Covid. My year-long experience of long Covid has been utter hell; my advice to anyone is to rest up as much as you need before your body makes that decision for you, and do not gaslight yourself into trying to push through it.

Lioness of God “Well, I have finished a 2nd book of poems in this last month”, Sylvia Plath wrote home to her mother on November, 1962, “30 new poems.” Her first volume, The Colossus, had appeared two years before a...

‘“I am a genius of a writer”, Plath had written to her mother. “I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” She gathered up the neat typescript in a black spring-binder, discovered on her desk after her suicide just months later.’

www.the-tls.com/literature/p...

Ah, National Poetry Day. A worthy endeavour and well meaning, but it does tend to conjure poetry as a charity case, poets running after you imploring ‘come back! It doesn’t have to rhyme!’ When all’s said and done, I’m with Frank O’Hara: ‘if you don’t need poetry, bully for you.’

The Big Listener for Tony Blair Midnight. Connaught Square. A headlight beam finds Cherie just back from her speaking date. She looks at you. Less animal of late. You lose no sleep, but wake within a dream. Your favourite: that old divided dark, the white square at your neck; your good ear bent towards the long sighs of your penitent. You rinse a thousand souls before the lark and wake refreshed, if somewhat at a loss as to why they seem so lost for words. They are your dead, who still rose to the birds the day we filled the booths and made the cross, before you'd forced them howling to their knees to suffer your attentions. Spare us. Please.

Ah yes, Tony Blair: a political figure famed for his grinning diplomacy, and not at all for war crimes in horrific Anglo-American pseudo-religious crusades. Trump says he’s a good guy, the best. I’m reminded of this furiously perfect sonnet by Don Paterson, which conjures Blair in Stalinist mode.

V (poem) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(poem)

As for many poets uneasy in their class consciousness, Tony Harrison’s brilliant controversial long poem V. (1985) blew me away when I first read it. But his short lyrics were sharp, wise, and deeply moving, too, cut from lived life. Saddened to hear the great man has passed. RIP.

One of the defining errors of our age is the insidious notion that all opinions are equal and valid. They’re not. Undermining corroborated expertise in a dubious overextension of alleged ‘democratic’ values, we end up with a political leader spreading dangerous medical misinformation.