@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. Lifelong Red. Likes a jog.
The AI revolution is here but, like most revolutions, it isn’t going to deliver what its proponents allege. The underlying purpose is to allow wealth hoarders to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
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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…
“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
Join.greenparty.org.uk
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.
‘“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.
“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’.
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.
‘“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.’
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.
