Just here to rankle the bluesky botcensor with a little art, namely, “The Divorce” — from Sophie Calle’s “Autobiographies (of the Husband” (1992) 🫶

"Only 2 items left in stock, buy now". No, you buy now, you're the flipping retailer - sort your supply chain out.

Since this space is still quite small, I’d like to share a poem that I have been writing, on and off, for about three years now. At long last, it is complete. Love is such an inconvenience.

Canetti: “I have constructed a library that will last for a good three hundred years, all I need now are those years.”

True. ‘I just use AI to design the outline. I wrote the essay myself.’ Well, my outlines are made by my brain. ‘I designed the outline myself. AI is just the scribe.’ You are supposed to be the scribe. Are we now being hierarchical in this way? Is Claude your RA now? Why do you need an RA at all?

It is as though the organisers of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize deliberately award it to the worst piece of fiction ever written. I mean, have you looked at the stories that were written without the help of AI? They are just as bad, just as tediously unoriginal, if not worse.

I used to be nostalgic for the freedom of childhood, now I’m nostalgic for the version of the internet where I was not automatically redirected to a useless AI-made page of rapidly populating untruth every time my finger slipped a little.

She said as much about publishing, but I took it as a rationalization rather than a lament, coming from a wealthy, high-profile author who is also board member of an AI-powered gaming company reportedly adapting one of her novels.

It is demoralising nonetheless to witness Tokarczuk capitulate in so feeble yet unabashed a manner to systemic violence. We are not as helpless as we are being made to feel, or as Tokarczuk would like us to believe. We cannot submit already, and if we do, we should be too ashamed to admit it.

I don't like any of this either, but from a critic's perspective, we're still just going to have to trust in our capacity to judge the book on its own terms

Google is justifying a move to default AI search by saying it "removes friction." The problem is that friction is a necessary part of life and this incessant need to rid ourselves of it is going to lead to so many problems we can't anticipate.

If you play music in public without headphones, you are a cunt. It really is that simple.

Once someone told me that I should listen to Taylor Swift because her work is like ‘poetry put to music.’ Whenever I have deviated (twice) from the principle that I must never speak about Swift, I have paid a price for it. ‘What do you think of Taylor Swift?’ I never think of Taylor Swift at all.

Given how much of the pleasure of writing is in the act itself, the use of AI seems counterproductive. If writing is laborious, as it sometimes is, then the labour is pleasurable. Why’d we want it any other way? The act of creation itself is masochistic, be it a novel, a film, a poem, a sculpture.

For some reason, I like it when a sentence closes with a word that ends with a vowel, preferably ‘e’. It can end with a consonant, but it has to be a decisive one, such as the ‘n’ of ‘option,’ though never the ‘s’ of ‘options.’ I am convinced this makes sentences sound cohesive and look complete.

Out of recent offerings the best bit is the following: "This morning, the village of Denethorpe, Northants, Was suddenly roused by ten men in strange pants." — T.S. Eliot surveys the Faber poetry slush pile, 10th June 1944

If AI can’t make money without massive energy subsidies, then AI can’t make money.

A lovely second-hand book, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, purchased three years ago in Bangalore. I never looked at it so closely before.

‘To be drawn to locality is to weigh the possibility of another life: It is not an “expression of personality, but an escape from it.”’ share.google/pmvANR0Y6pxT...

A novel about a man? Ridiculous! God made Madame Bovary, not Adam Bovary.

2/2 A vision differs from an opinion in that it is not falsifiable, and if the poet can be convinced that an opinion is wrong, he may (I’m speaking of Auden here) go ahead and delete the lines that express that opinion or, indeed, the whole poem in which it occurs.

"I often think that the responsibility of the poet is to strive to become the memory that people may possess in the future about what it means to be human: an ever-changing constant." —Fady Joudah

Once upon a time, I tweeted that too much rhyme thickens the ear (T. S. Eliot) and obscures the poem. In about two hours, I had received 17 replies to that tweet, one of which was, “Why so? I guess some people like neither rhyme nor reason.” I miss Twitter.

Last week I left my bag in a black cab. Assumed it was lost forever. Moments before I passed through security at Heathrow, the cabby—who’d identified me by my books—contacted me on Twitter. An hour later, bag in hand, I was ready to fly. He asked for a poem. Here you are, Gary Vidgeon!

Light at dawn.

After many years of ignoring Christopher Nolan, I recently came across Following (1998), which turned out to be an excellent film. It was a pleasant surprise.

Leaning on Erik Satie in my battle against time and tempo.

One cannot quite put into words how disrespectful it is to be asked to review, edit, assess, or even so much as read AI-generated prose. I cannot bring myself to use my blood-nourished brain, my finite life, to engage with system-generated gibberish anymore. The indignity is unfathomable.

‘The torment of disappointed hope becomes a brutality to oneself, if one is unable to surrender one’s hope.’ —Delmore Schwartz

Each dawn that breaks / is one dawn less. —Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, from his new collection, ‘Of Least Concern’

‘James Schuyler once told an interviewer that he didn’t write the kind of poetry that attracted critics. “It’s too easy,” he added. It wasn’t easy, though, to arrive at his kind of ease. He’d sometimes spend up to a year tinkering with a poem.’ Matthew Bevis: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Louise at 80, 22 April, 2023

Those who have attacked women out of envy are often wretched men who have met women of greater intelligence and nobler ethic than they possess themselves, which pains them and makes them resentful. —Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies)

Pomegranate and Muskmelon, February 2026.

Five poems from Outlook’s Anniversary Issue, published earlier this year as part of a section curated perceptively by Naveen Kishore.