Lovely to see Matt Goodwin choke on his own sense of entitlement as an actual working-class candidate takes the seat he assumed was his. The empty prophet, the morbid symptom of the digital age, the anti-migrant sentiment stoker, your self-awarded role as tribune is wearing toga-thin. Fuckety-bye.

#EnglishCreates: Futures Today, Dr JT Welsch (University of York) re-examines the so-called 'death of reading': 'Like most clickbait, these rants rest on a false opposition. There’s no real war between print and digital media.' universityenglish.ac.uk/death-of-rea... #EnglishStudies

It feels remarkable that I haven't put out a book of poems since 2019, since before the pandemic completely altered our lives (it did). It feels like I've been writing poems nonstop since Northly came out. Pacemaker was such a big part of my life from 2020-2023.

Galleys of my new book of poems, coming soon from Veer2.

Workers don’t vote for 5 consecutive bouts of industrial action with a 75% turnout unless something is seriously wrong. Solidarity with all in Unite UCU ✊🔥

New from Leafe Press: "State Honey" by Andrew Taylor @dradny.bsky.social "...fast-moving to contemplative, presenting experience mediated by language that is fragmentary and shifting, disconcerting and never dull." www.leafepress.org/2026/01/stat...

Larry Eigner

Henri Chopin J'attends l'homme! 1969

I read that as Dog Club at first. What thoughts I had (for a moment).

There’s an irony that had Labour selected Burnham for this by-election he probably would have won. They blocked him for fear he could replace Starmer. But that decision has surely only strengthened Burnham’s position and weakened the PM more drastically.

Gorton and Denton by-election result: GRN: 40.7% (+27.5) REF: 28.7% (+14.7) LAB: 25.4% (-25.3) CON: 1.9% (-6.0) LDEM: 1.8% (-2.1) Green GAIN from Labour.

The Deformers: a crushing defeat for Farage's Tory Boyband and all far-right miscreants.

Some lovely pictures of joint editors of A Letter to the Dead: Collected Poems by Lynette Roberts, Charles Mundye and Patrick McGuinness at an event honouring Roberts held last night at the Argentine Ambassador’s Residence in London.

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

As always, I note how the main western HE educational "social mobility" (for all the damage of that phrase) that billionaires fund is usually to give a few select people slots at elite institutions, rather than to fund institutions that give broad opportunity to those conventionally denied HE.

Such a mad story. So Mandelson is allegedly secretly planning to flee to the British Virgin Islands and is accidentally rumbled by the bloody Speaker of the House who just happened to be on a visit there! That’s the kind of bad luck that tells you you’ve ran out of lives.

I write about my review of Tim Allen's books in @tearsinthefence.bsky.social here: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/02/one-.... But note that Norman Jope writes about the Plymouth Scene (out of which Allen emerged) in Litter @leafepress.bsky.social here: www.littermagazine.org/2026/02/revi....

A reminder about the book of tributes to Ric Hool robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/01/trib..., and I've added a link to a talk on Ric's work by Ian Brinton: here in @leafepress.bsky.social www.littermagazine.org/2025/09/ian-...

Do these guys know you can just read the Abstract and Conclusion if you want to be a lazy guy that doesn’t do his job? You don’t have to burn down a rain forest to be a shitty academic.

jesus christ

As Black History Month winds down, seeing a new high in monthly traffic for the digital collection I edit on Af-Am Poetry: 37,000 users in February. Writings by Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay are the most in demand. Some new additions to the site this month:

New Directions in Trojan Horse Humour... #HigherEd #EdcHat #AcademicSky #classics

Yes, it's part of their foreign policy statement. Wake up Britain!

For no particular reason, I remind you of the glories of the reporting on Cecil the lion and his brother Jericho.

#EnglishCreates: Futures We kick off our series on Critical Reading with Prof Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway): 'in the increasingly scientised discourse which has so effectively helped to teach decoding, the fundamental holism of reading can get lost.' universityenglish.ac.uk/reading-is-a...

It’s very special and I’m glad to have been part of its assembly.

I went somewhere in winter with lots of poets who basically only wrote ‘bad mum/husband/dad/ look at this tree/ oh no my mortality’ poems and it was fine and some of them were very good but if I ever write like that take me out to a quiet barn and make me reread Tarlo et al.

"In a pretty edition of Mallarme’s poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word *oiseaux* and scrawled above it 'birds'” (Nabokov, Pnin)

Later this month, Lydia Unsworth will be reading poetry alongside Tom Jenks and David Gaffney at Saul Hay Gallery, Manchester - February 26th 6.30 to 8.30pm. @lydiaunsworth.bsky.social www.saulhayfineart.co.uk/future-event...

so exciting that this book is in the world it is fierce and rigorous and also fun to read

Sometimes you need confirmation that there are politicians who are in it because they want to improve the lot of the vulnerable and bring down those who exploit them. Here is one of them. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I write about my review of Tim Allen's books in @tearsinthefence.bsky.social here: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/02/one-.... But note that Norman Jope writes about the Plymouth Scene (out of which Allen emerged) in Litter @leafepress.bsky.social here: www.littermagazine.org/2026/02/revi....

A reminder about the book of tributes to Ric Hool robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/01/trib..., and I've added a link to a talk on Ric's work by Ian Brinton: here in @leafepress.bsky.social www.littermagazine.org/2025/09/ian-...

New on Futch Journal: 'In Other Words: An entanglement of o & E' www.futchpress.info/post/in-othe... The O-obsessed olivier met with Noa Micaela Fields ahead of the launch of her debut poetry book 'E'. Searching for the trans souls of their chosen vowels, they role-played in conversation as o and E.

"Abstraction is a metaphor, not a style; the connection of one abstract work to another is by family resemblance, in Wittgenstein's sense." From our Spring 2013 issue, read Charles Bernstein's "Disfiguring Abstraction": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

There was also a rogue ‘ppp’ smack in the middle of a line from one of the new Seamus Heaney poems published by Faber

Glen Baxter

there's a nugget here which helps to explain Brown's character and why he was so incensed by the allegations against Mandelson from their time in office

Drawing on literary studies, philosophy, social science and neuroscience, @noreenmasud.bsky.social's project at @bristoluni.bsky.social will interrogate the deep structural and aesthetic impact of face blindness on contemporary poets and novelists who identify as face blind.

Christ, this is awful

The next event in our Cultural Landscapes series is a free talk by Dr Sarah Falcus & Professor Katsura Sako on 'Age, Generation and "Greenness" in Children’s Picturebooks'. Taking place in Ambleside on Tue 3 March - see here for further details and to book: www.ticketsource.co.uk/cultural-lan...

Important post on the importance of reading by @jenniferacooke.bsky.social #EnglishCreates @ies-sas.bsky.social @englishassociation.bsky.social @engmediacentre.bsky.social @lboroenglish.bsky.social @rsliterature.bsky.social @literacy-trust.bsky.social

Raffi Cavoukian 🇨🇦 @Raffi_RC Denmark sending two ships to Washington DC

A set for a bad re-make of The Prisoner?

Great image here 👇👇👇👇 be sure to follow @rjmac65.bsky.social for more great photos of Liverpool