Category craic

Back in October 2020, a musician called An Croenen got in touch to ask if she could put the words of my poem Fatima to music, and created something spellbindingly beautiful. Then someone else offered to make a video to…

Some people have a clear idea of where their lives are going to take them, draw up a detailed plan of how they’re going to get there, and set off. I’ve always had more of a distracted-by-the-shiny-new-things approach to the…

As of this morning, you can take a walk through Wolverhampton and listen to how nine artists have re-imagined some of the empty spaces to be found within the city centre. The IfWeHadThisSpace project is part of #offsite9, which offers…

You might think that – confined to the house with one leg in plaster – I’d have been writing poems to beat the band over the past couple of months. You might, but you’d be wrong. I’d vaguely hoped I…

Confined to the house – or as much of it as I can navigate on a pair of crutches – I’m more thankful than ever for accessible, online events which fill my time and keep me from doom-scrolling through social…

Gravity, the edge of a stage, and a concrete floor are all – in their own special ways – wonderful things. Working together in combination, they’re also dangerous and painful. Which is as short and succinct an explanation as I…

In 2022, British Art Show 9 – BAS9 – visits several cities round the UK. One of them is Wolverhampton. Running alongside this extravaganza is BAS9 Offsite, which is a programme for local creatives, and I’m delighted to be one…

Over the years I’ve learned to recognise that poetry has its own timetable. There will be months when I don’t write anything much at all, and others where the pen just doesn’t stop moving. At the moment, I’m going through…

Zoom may have been a godsend to performance poets over the past eighteen months as our normal venues shut their doors because of the pandemic, but nothing – and I mean nothing – beats a real live gig. And it…

This summer, from the comfort of my own armchair (or, indeed, curled up underneath a duvet) I’m covering a surprising amount of ground. Or rather, my work is. From August 6th till the 30th, a digital version of the pandemonialists’…

Back in December I wrote the first of the Tim and Steve dialogues, my attempt to shed light on – and have a few belly laughs at – the car crash that was Brexit. The dialogues quickly expanded their range…

Earlier this year, stuck in a lockdown which seemed to be going on for ever, I decided it’d be no bad thing to learn some new skills. All my videos to date had been pretty basic: captions topping and tailing…