The Life-Illusion

  I have been musing recently on a Dylan Thomas poem: The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. It describes a singular, sovereign force, possessing the ability to give life and take it away. Something that controls every movement of this world yet exists beyond it. Is this God? To Thomas, a Christian, perhaps. To me, it instead brings to mind something closer to earth - something which is given mysterious form as the eponymous “gigantic emerald-skinned stranger and tester of men” which haunts David Lowery's subversive retelling of the Arthurian poem, The Green Knight (2021). The supernatural creature appears twice throughout the film, yet pervades its every frame, symbolising both life and death. Summoned by the witch Morgan le Fay to the court of King Arthur on Christmas day, it represents a magical, paganistic intrusion into the “dull sanctum” of the Round Table. It brings with it a cha...

There is one part of a David Graeber interview (in The White Review ) my mind often circles back to. Asked how deliberation in anarchist circles works, he responds: “ One difference between the kind of anarchist groups I like and the classic Marxist group, for instance, is that we don't start by defining reality – our points of unity are not our analyses of the situation, but rather what we want to do, the action we want to take, and how we go about it. Plus you have to give one another the benefit of the doubt. One of the principles of the consensus process is that you can't challenge anyone on their motives; you have to assume that everyone is being honest and has good intentions . Not because you necessarily think it's true, but as an extension of what might be considered the fundamental anarchist insight: if you treat people like children they will tend to act like children. If you treat them like adults, there's at least some chance they will act responsibly. Iro...

  It's been just over a month since I started my PhD and I've spent pretty much all that time enjoying my newfound, unlimited institutional access to books and articles. However, I haven't had much to write about beyond notes and thoughts on my readings. I wanted to, as a bare minimum, write at least one blog post a month to detail the research and reading I have been doing. Before applying, much of my reading around modernism had been confined to work that directly related to Powys, Read and/or the Apocalyptics. I wanted to compile a bibliography (and potentially a literature review) of materials pertaining to the historical contextualisation I will undertake in my first chapter, 'Landscapes of Interwar Modernism'. I started the month by looking through recent issues of Modernism / Modernity to get a sense of the scope of the discourse. This journal has a “recent books of interest” section which greatly helped identifying more recent work. I looked for handbooks a...

I will officially be beginning my PhD at the end of the month! Now this is a certainty, I will be dedicating a lot more time to this blog. I have been writing and working on a number of posts recently, but most of them I haven't posted because they ended reading more like diary entries than expositions or analyses. I have also been working on some “Introduction” posts for various authors I'll be looking at for my PhD (aside from JCP and HR) including: Henry Treece, Nicholas Moore, E. Graham Howe, Alex Comfort, D. S. Savage, Kathleen Raine, Paul Nash as well as groups and ideas like the New Apocalypse, the Villa Seurat, some various strains of anarchist thought and Neo-romanticism. Many of these I have started writing, but I want them to be quite comprehensive accounts which other people might refer to in future – for which I personally have a lot more research and reading to do. For now, here is my research proposal. I have an alternative version of this proposal which is a lot...

  I have been working on a small collection of poems, tentatively titled Ampersands , which I am hoping to release in the new year. This will be my first self-published collection (not including the poems in Goblin Realism , which, incidentally, I will also be publishing the second edition of which around a similar time). I have compiled around twelve short poems, potentially stretching that number to fifteen depending on the amount of poetic creativity I can conjure before its publication. I have also been experimenting with collage to accompany the words, but these are still at the level of very-basic experimentation. I do like the idea of having art alongside the poems, though, something along the same manner as William Blake's illuminated works (precursor to zines that these are?). I use a lot of ampersands in my poetry, hence the title, which is something I have borrowed from John Clare, especially his long poem The Shepherd's Calendar . As a poet of nature and place, I...