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Ben Wilkinson

@benwilko85.bsky.social
1.2K followers 492 following 193 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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Reposted by Ben Wilkinson
Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
'The decision to slash funding for creative subjects comes despite the field being named as one of the UK’s “highest potential sectors” in the government’s industrial strategy.' 1/2
timeshighereducation.com
Cuts to creative courses ‘undermining government’s own strategy’
Arts institutions warn creative education is becoming increasingly hard to deliver as government slashes funding from September onwards
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
The AI revolution is here but, like most revolutions, it isn’t going to deliver what its proponents allege. The underlying purpose is to allow wealth hoarders to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
Poetry in Motion, my new Substack newsletter, is go! Join me for a jog, perambulation, and the occasional sprint through poetry, prose, and plenty else besides. Subscribe to get new posts to your email inbox each week. open.substack.com/pub/benwilko
open.substack.com
Poetry in Motion | Ben Wilkinson | Substack
Join me for a jog, perambulation, and the occasional sprint through poetry, prose, and plenty else besides. Click to read Poetry in Motion, by Ben Wilkinson, a Substack publication. Launched 24 days a...
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
“Another reason I chose to share my experience with long COVID was that I wanted to scare the shit out of people who weren’t taking it seriously. Think you’re too healthy or fit to end up like me?” Seems I found my new running crew: The Always Tired Club. www.8020endurance.com/dying-to-run...
8020endurance.com
Dying to Run, Episode 4: "The Always Tired Club" | 80/20 Endurance
Matt Fitzgerald has been a runner for almost his entire life, but his running days ended abruptly in 2020 when he developed long COVID, a post-viral chronic
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
Only waking up to this now as I’ve spent a chunk of 2024/25 under a rock, but what happened to the Next Generation Poets 2024, i.e. the fourth instalment in the PBS/Poetry Society’s promotional celebration of 20 new voices predicted to dominate British verse in the coming decade?
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The Guardian @theguardian.com · 22/10/2025
The politics of despair have engulfed Britain. But Zack Polanski is offering a way out | Owen Jones
theguardian.com
The politics of despair have engulfed Britain. But Zack Polanski is offering a way out | Owen Jones
The leader of the Greens wants to focus on battles that unite – such as taxing wealth – without yielding an inch on minority rights, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones
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Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
Join.greenparty.org.uk
If reform can rocket through the polls with a politics of despair, then it's time for the green party to do the same thing but with a politics of hope.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
Football is like life: we meet with both triumph and disaster. True character is about treating both the same, with class and dignity. This new-look team will be special. Patience. Some folks need to check themselves, remember who we are, and who our boys lost over the summer.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
You know we’re through the looking glass here in the UK when the radical right wing has ties to and defends Putin’s Russia, but tries to accuse the left of ‘communism’ for proposing such moderate conservative views as taxing billionaires and dismantling the rentier economy.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
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 · 09/10/2025
‘“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...
mcsweeneys.net
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 ...
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
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 · 08/10/2025
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.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
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.
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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 06/10/2025
“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.
buff.ly
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 ...
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Michael Emonds @michaelje67.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
Well said, Gary Neville! 👏
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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
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 · 06/10/2025
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.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
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’.
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Longbarrow Press @longbarrowpress.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
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 · 03/10/2025
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.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
‘“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...
the-tls.com
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...
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
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.’
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
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 · 27/09/2025
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 · 26/09/2025
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.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
Put it on the banned list with shards, gossamer, and petrichor. Immediately.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 03/03/2025
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...
theguardian.com
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
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
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 · 14/09/2025
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
someflowerssoon.substack.com
Unfunded Hobbit Research
In defence of academic inspiration
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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
'Analysis of almost 45,000 courses in Times Higher Education’s Courses 360 databases found that roughly 3,900 had shut down between 2024-25 and the upcoming academic year.' 1/2
timeshighereducation.com
Almost 4,000 courses closed at UK universities since 2024
Analysis reveals half of closures have come at lower-tariff universities, creating a ‘vicious cycle’ for institutions struggling to attract students
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
On #SuicidePreventionDay, here’s my poem ‘The Signal Box’. Twice in my life I’ve been to that darkest place of suicidal thoughts; it affects so many, and still kills far too many. But suicide is preventable— with caring interventions and reduced mental health stigma. Talking saves lives.
The Signal Box

I'm four pints deep at The Signal Box 
since no trains are leaving Euston now.
At the bar there's a guy who talks and talks.
The departure boards are blank as snow.
Silent as someone who, three hours ago, stood at the tracks' edge. Turning and turning 
a stone in one hand. Someone who knew one thing, and one thing only. Burning 
in their chest for weeks. As bundled kindling 
takes, slowly at first, then spreads, a lie with the fierce colours of truth. Nothing now but the wires' hum, a cold winter sky.
I'm five pints deep at The Signal Box.
At the bar there's a guy who talks and talks.

— Ben Wilkinson
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
‘Salah remains an enigma. 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑎ℎ lives up to its title: like many a Premier League defender, Hughes is forced to follow in the striker’s evasive wake.’ My review of a biography of the iconic Liverpool winger, in the new TLS (@thetls.bsky.social). www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...
the-tls.com
Salah-mania
The Egypt and Liverpool winger Mohamed Salah is one of the most recognizable sportspeople on the planet. Known for his prolific goalscoring (which he
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Mel Campbell @incrediblemelk.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
Lmao at this open letter to the Unimelb VC proposing she pay for Meanjin with a 10% salary sacrifice that would still leave her better paid than the VC of the University of Cambridge It was my joy to sign, & I recommend doing so to all in the world of arts & letters
openletter.earth
An Open Letter to the Vice Chancellor of The University of Melbourne on the Closure of Meanjin
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
An elegant new look for the now fortnightly TLS, which includes my brief review of Simon Hughes’s Chasing Salah, the biography of the iconic Egypt and Liverpool winger. Score.
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Alex Partridge @alexpartridge87.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Fascinated that In Our Time is one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts among under 35s. The young people demand three academics and a peer discussing Demosthenes, apparently. And they’re right to do so.
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Will Davies @will-davies.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Trying to work out how the REF can be tweaked around 'national priorities', if those 'priorities' were never communicated to researchers when they undertook the research. Or are they suggesting it's all a game of retrofitting past activities to the measures?
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Let’s call it as it is: AI’s success is based in its dangerous appeal to a childish urge inside each of us. This urge still craves ease and minimum effort (‘but it’s too difficult!’). We ignore the rich rewards of such effort, and of learning to do things well, at our own cost.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
Immigrants are not your enemy. Trans people are not your enemy. Women are not your enemy. The old, the young, those with disabilities— all these ordinary folks are not your enemy. The enemy of the people has and always will be the malevolence of unaccountable power and unimaginable private wealth.
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John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
Essentially my thinking is that even if it turns out there is value for students and staff in embedding LLMs throughout the university curriculum, I do not believe that those pushing this kind of hasty and universal adoption have the knowledge (of AI or of education) to have made those calls.
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John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
It is not news that those who hold university purse strings often turn out to be extremely susceptible to salesmanship, particularly when it's framed in terms of missing out on what everyone else is doing. Will they learn from this? If universities survive, will governance change? I'm not hopeful.
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John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
‘Open, explicit racism seems to be on the rise in Britain. It starts with refugees like me and other migrants – but they will soon come for other people simply because they are not white, or belong to the “wrong” religion, or their sexual orientation. Unless we act now, things will get worse.’
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
There’s a strong case, given the magnitude of his achievements, for Don Paterson as one such of our poetic elders. I do so in my @livunipress.bsky.social study of the poetry. His @faberbooks.bsky.social Selected Poems and ars poetica The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre are major works of their time.
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation. Which is why it makes my head explode when people surrender in advance verbally, which they do all the time about politics.
meditationsinanemergency.com
On Not Surrendering in Advance, or During, or At Any Point Thereafter
There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation in that context. Words have power. They not ...
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
The simple fact is, if your enemy is journalists and honest journalism, your enemy is the truth.
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 03/08/2025
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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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
The Lionesses have again proven an inspiration to the entire nation. Such joy and resilience, collective spirit and sheer determination. To achieve one of the pinnacles of your sport in back to back tournaments. If you’re not full of admiration for this group, check for a pulse. ❤️
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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Over 1 in 4 women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime and violence towards women is overwhelmingly committed by current and former partners and husbands (source: UN), so the odd asylum seeker is really not the problem, and demonstrably a statistical minority.
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