Poet, and pedestrian
Sheffield, England
Joined October 2013
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During Covid lockdowns my partner and I started taking our daily exercise along Sheffield’s Rivelin valley early in the morning – from 6am to 8.30am. On our walks, we paid attention to life around us – to small creatures, insects and birds.
longbarrowblog.wordpress.com…
Matt retweeted
On Instant Classics this week, we take on a big one: Euripides Medea. How do we read this play, what does it say about women who kill their children? youtube.com/watch?v=kEZvMsp8…
Matt retweeted
Much appreciate Billy Mills' thoughtful and personally incisive poetry review of my collection 'Tree Climbing': ellipticalmovements.wordpres…
On these early strolls
we scan our fellow walkers,
assessing their breath.
Time-fractured tree,
slow-dying: shelves of fungus
catch pills of rain.
Relieved of a wren -
a claw of branch, gerontion
in waking spasm.
longbarrowblog.wordpress.com…
Matt retweeted
What US Big Tech has done to our kids, for years, is evil.
8 year old girls being targeted for make up ads when they quickly delete selfies!
The idea parents can compete with trillion $ empires - built on addiction - is daft. I want a state that protects.
We can also fall
from too much caution across
the slippery ground.
Back on the estate –
a cat squats in a pot plant,
laying its small worm.
longbarrowpress.com/2026/09/…
The years between us?
You can hear distant beehives,
I only question.
A coarse trail of salt
is seeping from a grit box –
an old man’s stubble.
Flosses of horse tail
suture hoof-trodden mud -
they shiver and flinch.
longbarrowpress.com/2026/09/…
Matt retweeted
"Young people are like: Please give me an alienating bullsh*t job! I just want to pay my bills!"
In 2018, David Graeber published the book Bullsh*t Jobs: A Theory, arguing that capitalist economies have become “vast engines for producing nonsense” held up by hordes of soulless jobs offering meaningless work.
Almost a decade on, the problem now is that there aren't even "bullsh*t jobs" available for young people to pay the bills and move out of their family home, argues @DaliaGebrial on Novara Live.
Watch the full show on our YouTube channel.
Voices carrying
from far across the valley –
the clear names of dogs.
[Spider on our wall.
The plug timer ticks and scrapes.
Shadows stretch and shrink.]
longbarrowblog.wordpress.com…
If you’ve spent time reading about haiku, you’ve probably heard some confident advice:
Haiku must be 5-7-5.
Haiku has to be about nature.
Haiku can’t use metaphor.
Much of the advice beginners receive is either incomplete, outdated, or simply wrong.
17onji.substack.com/p/5-haik…
Matt retweeted
Still on the wildside wind certainly makes dramatic Sea's
#Seahouses
@NorthEastTweets
Matt retweeted
Obituary of Douglas Dunn by James Campbell: theguardian.com/books/2026/o…
Matt retweeted
"It's cost Americans $1 billion already in excess healthcare costs. So that's in the real world, in this political economy, that is what AI is doing to healthcare."
Ash Sarkar (@ayocaesar) is joined by Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) and Astra Taylor (@astradisastra), to discuss AI and its impact on the economy.
Watch the full episode of Downstream IRL on our YouTube channel.
For days we’d passed through Walkley Cemetery like a portal, but one morning the gates were locked.
There was a large hand-chalked sign which read:
‘TURN AROUND & GO HOME’
You could feel an energy in the emboldened chalk. You could taste it on the air.
longbarrowpress.com/2026/09/…
Raymond Williams’s Resources for Hope
To be radical requires a theory of how this world, for all its problems, contains and is fostering the beginning of another, very different world.
dissentmagazine.org/article/…
No One Today
of my own died. I
did not die. My
love did not. Is intact. I
checked.
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/…
~Jorie Graham
An extraordinary poem, from a brilliant collection: KILL/ING/SPR/EE (2026)
Matt retweeted
I only today came across the concept of ‘stigmergy’, an important element in AI’s capacities to change environments, systems and behaviour without being instructed to do so. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigme…
