Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Autumnal non-substack roundup of my work

Apparently the trick to substack is brief posts posted frequently. That is not the model here. And it is unlikely to become so. But this post will be brief because it’s just to point to some of the writing I’ve done off the platform.

First, and most recently, I’m delighted to have a sort-of-poem (an essay in rhyming couplets) in the latest issue of Creative-Critical. It’s part of a symposium on the subject of indiscipline, and on what the function of poetry is within the institutions of modern academia. I’m grateful to Lucy Mercer and Sam Buchan-Watts for inviting me, and for running my contribution.

The collection also includes work by (the legend) Rey Conquer, Lavinia Singer, Jess Cotton, John Wedgwood Clarke, and Denise Riley(!). Check it out.

I also have a review of Maureen McLane’s latest book of poetics, My Poetics, in the current issue of PN Review. A small excerpt:

But because I have more strings to my bow than just poetry, you can also find me writing about bodybuilding influencers in the pages of The London Magazine’s September issue:

Between sets of pull-ups done in such a manner as to emphasise the hypertrophic (muscle-building) loaded stretch on the lats – the hang at the bottom of the movement – three profoundly jacked men discuss the meaning of life. They have talked about ‘game’ and other forms of sexual marketplace optimisation, they have talked microplastics in the testicles, their effects on male hormone production, whether microplastics in the testicles matter due to the soon-to-arrive revolution in genomics; but now they have reached the real meat of their discussion, the intelligence explosion of the universe, the arrival of the AI God that may or may not kill all humans.

The point, says the shortest man, who has a PhD in sport science, is that the robot god is inevitable. Whether it eliminates humanity is irrelevant because intelligence itself will survive, in a superior form. It will swell until it is coterminous with existence, a kind of Hegelian absolute spirit, the universe finally knowing itself. To die for that, to be annihilated, is beautiful (what a goddamn dream). The least jacked, most conventionally handsome man asks his companion if he believes that truth exists outside of human perception. I don’t have to believe it, the man with the PhD in sport science, Dr Mike Israetel (Dissertation: ‘The Interrelationships of Fitness Characteristics in Division 1 Athletes’) says, it’s been proven mathematically.

A further London Magazine piece on fatherhood and the evolution of language will be with subscribers to that fine journal in the winter. Meanwhile this Substack should soon (eventually) be hosting pieces on Robert Browning’s most underrated poem, Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, and a reading of Northrop Frye and Frederic Jameson’s (RIP) understandings of wish fulfilment via the character of Jack Reacher.

Until then.