Cormac Culkeen

The diarrhoea is real.

What a day. Two poems in the latest splendid edition of Causeway, and then three poems in the equally splendid Autumn issue of Southlight that I was completely unaware had been accepted. I might put them up in due course. Grab copies, they're great publications.
#poetrymagazines

For those asking for background - I was in Sudan twice this year and wrote about it
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

I'll tell you something. You can tell a lot about a person if they're left alone with a sheet of bubble wrap.

California Uber Alles Dead Kennedys

Now Spinning: Dead Kennedys, California Uber Alles.

‘That ballroom looks pretty cool though, eh dad?’
‘Shut up, son’

Having not watched anything in TV land for the longest time, I gotta say Task, with Mark Ruffalo, is fab. It's like a Russell Banks or Larry Brown novel. Tense and violent and often unexpectedly moving.

Tired but buzzing. I won second prize in the Frances Browne Poetry Competition 2025 for my poem, Meteor. I'm a happy chappie!

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today.

Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

What's clever about the old Irish carved turnip heads is they capture perfectly the makers' disgust at the commercialisation of Halloween.

Very, very sad to learn of Brian Patten's death today. Gargling With Jelly changed my life when I was 11, and his poems always got to me at various points in life. Thank you.

This joint press conference makes me want to take a baseball bat to the television. Absolutely sickening.

“Poets are the ones who can describe the guts of life. We have to use the language so demandingly, just to minimally preserve what makes us human. And you have to practice.”

-- C.D. Wright

I thought I was growing up in a racially tolerant Britain. I now realise I was wrong | Rohan Sathyamoorthy I’ve experienced more racism in the past year than the rest of my life put together – the only answer is for young people to stand up to the far right, says writer Rohan Sathyamoorthy

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Obscurity is not profundity.

-- Mona Van Duyn

Sickening footage from Nuneaton tonight, where a Sky News interview with a local businessman was disrupted by racists hurling abuse.

Another local said, "Warwickshire Council Council has gone to Reform... It's given certain people a licence to be aggressive and racist."

Why, you might ask, do the BBC and Sky News, casting their editorial guidelines to the wind, keep giving massive airtime to the far right, while shutting out leftwing voices? Don't their bosses understand the likely consequences?
Only one explanation now remains.
They do.
And it is what they want.

Chris & Cosey -- The Gates Of Ancient Cities [Ambient/Synth] (1982)

Chris & Cosey -- The Gates Of Ancient Cities [Ambient/Synth] (1982)
https://redd.it/7xduq0
https://youtu.be/l6p_0TfQMgg

Daniel Trilling · Is this fascism? Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour...

‘Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, “in the early days of a new fascism”? In 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong places.’

@trillingual.bsky.social on far-right populism:

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Here's the problem - the right make up a story and the media plaster it everywhere.

The left tell a true story and the media ignore it.

The right hasn't actually 'hijacked' anything. The right have been given an open door while the left - the majority - are barricaded away.

Someone needs to adopt this 16yo named Hope from the golden valley animal humane.

And it's off to the Drumshanbo Written Word Festival we go. My first poetry workshop. Wish me luck...

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TV news people. It's 'nuclear.' Noo cleer. Not 'nucular.'

As a Bryan Ferry devotee I find this all rather terrifying and pointless.

"The mere idea of genetic or locational virtue has been, outside of religion, the main source of mayhem and death since the world began."

Jim Harrison

Sally Rooney: “I would happily publish this statement in a UK newspaper–but that would now be illegal. The present UK Gov has willingly stripped its own citizens of basic rights & freedoms, including the right to express & read dissenting opinions, in order to protect its relationship with Israel.”

If it looks like a coup, and sounds like a coup, well.....