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Ben Wilkinson

@benwilko85.bsky.social

1.1K followers 480 following 180 posts

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.

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · Nov 14

This seems a much healthier place than Musk’s disinformation hellhole, so here goes. I’m a writer, poet, critic, and lecturer whose poems, essays, and reviews have regularly appeared in the majors. Sagittarius, lifelong Liverpool FC fan, enjoys a jog. More here: www.serenbooks.com/seren-author...

Ben Wilkinson - Seren

Ben Wilkinson was born in the English Midlands and now lives in Sheffield, Yorkshire. His poems, criticism and journalism regularly appear in national publications including The Guardian, The Poetry R...

www.serenbooks.com

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 4d

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

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 4d

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.

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 5d

‘“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...

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 ...

www.mcsweeneys.net

Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 5d

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

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 5d

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.

Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 6d

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.

Reposted by Ben Wilkinson

McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 7d

“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.

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 ...

buff.ly

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Reposted by Ben Wilkinson

Michael Emonds @michaelje67.bsky.social · 8d

Well said, Gary Neville! 👏

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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 8d

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

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 8d

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.

T. S. Eliot Prize @tseliotprize.bsky.social · 8d

We are thrilled to be able to reveal this year's T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist!
Our judges have chosen ten books "of great range, suggestiveness and power; from Entebbe to Manitoba... there is something here for everyone."

Find out more now: tseliot.com/prize/news/

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 10d

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’.

Reposted by Ben Wilkinson

Longbarrow Press @longbarrowpress.bsky.social · 14d

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/

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

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 11d

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.

Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 11d

‘“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...

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...

www.the-tls.com

Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 12d

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.’

Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 13d

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.

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.

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 15d

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

V (poem) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 17d

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.

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 18d

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.

Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 22d

Put it on the banned list with shards, gossamer, and petrichor. Immediately.

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · Mar 3

My letter to @theguardian.com about the spiralling use of AI by undergraduates to write their essays, and how students are simply taking their cues from a world losing touch with the irreplaceable value of human creativity and critical thinking.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Students’ use of AI spells death knell for critical thinking | Letters

Letters: Prof Andrew Moran and Dr Ben Wilkinson on the ramifications of the explosion in university essays being written with artificial intelligence

www.theguardian.com

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · Aug 3

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.

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Jeremy Noel-Tod @jntod.bsky.social · Sep 14

After making a dumb joke on here about the creative side of academic writing as "unfunded hobbit research", I then wrote a serious post about it

Unfunded Hobbit Research

In defence of academic inspiration

someflowerssoon.substack.com

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 28d

All because it’s entirely ideological, of course; SLTs are dominated by those from business, economics, STEM, and the powerful valorise their own expertise. If the goalposts are routinely moved after the ball has been kicked to make sure the right folks score, how can you ever win?

Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 28d

Excellent post. Sadly, in some of the smallest post-‘92s, this has long been managerial (bad) practice as well as attitude— sabbaticals are virtually unheard of, and even when subject areas manage, without resource, to excel in T&L and produce 3*/4* research, they receive no reward or support.

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