iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ben Wilkinson

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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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

Yup, I expect the PBS couldn’t justify it financially. The original in ‘94 was a collab between them and The Poetry Society; a good pooling of resources. But these are difficult times for arts orgs and charities. Surviving, ta, even if this long Covid business is really living up to its name…

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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 · 13/11/2025

I don’t think the promotion ran, which seems a shame. Like prizes, these marketing exercises are what they are, and never perfect. But anything that strives to promote excellence in contemporary poetry beyond the usual bubbles strikes me as valuable.

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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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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 · 18/10/2025

Definitely worth paying for to avoid potential complications if you were to catch the virus, but infuriating that it isn’t routinely available to those in various vulnerable categories. I’m properly on the mend now, mercifully, so I feel quite lucky in some ways.

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

I’ve spent nearly a year and a half recovering from a fairly horrific spell of long Covid, but because it isn’t yet recognised as a medical condition, I had to pay nearly £100 for my recent vaccination.

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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

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

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 · 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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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

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?

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

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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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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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

This is just a convoluted way of saying I’m very soon 40 and I absolutely refuse to accept that.

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Ben Wilkinson @benwilko85.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

Really solid defensive performance and found a way as always; shame about Konate’s injury as he had a great game. Obvs Szobo for MOTM. Gerrardesque screamer. There’s a title to be defended 💪

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