The title is misleading, sarcastic. This poem is a response to a talk by some guy called Alex Epstein, who started something called The Human Flourishing Project. Alex believes nonrenewable energy sources are the reason for human flourishing. The rise in population (which he seems to think good because that means humanity is flourishing), health, […]
Category: Materials
Motif Lately
This is a motifational poem. The motif motifates the writer, spurring associations to render the poem into a unity, if only a superficial, galvanizing unity. But where would anything be without either motifation or superficilaity? Nature made man & man makes superficial motifations. It’s endless. The motif for me is occasioned by a form of […]
Morning on & on
Been rummaging—again—through the poems I wrote on my return to England. Found this one, with a refrain, a repetition, & repetition is very much puncturing the days without mercy. I don’t recall the exact details of my disposition at the time of writing this. Poems tend to fall into a constellation of activity, a particularly […]
Close Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Gun Island’ (2019)
My close reading, examines the chapter ‘High Water’ from Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). In this chapter, Deen and Cinta are in Venice. They visit the gentrified Punta della Dogana (Customs House Point), which Cinta remembers was a ‘dilapidated old place’[1] when she was a child. It has become ‘like every other building in […]
Future
I was browsing through the 30 or so poems I wrote—& agonized over the quality of—on my return to England & this one feels cogent to the circumstances we currently find ourselves groaning under. I have been writing about access to futures through the lens of queer theory and ecology. They share a common problem: […]
A Brief Introduction to Object Oriented Ontology & Speculative Realism: The How of What
Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) challenges commonly held considerations towards what objects are and how they (inter)act in the world. Ecology, science, economics, art, architecture, and programming are core disciplines OOO utilizes. In OOO we encounter objects not only in rendered, physical, tactile modes, but in addition, processual, agentive & eventful modes. Human, a priori encounters […]
Actor Rosie Race
My friend Rosie is an actor in Devon. Due to the coronavirus lock-down, Rosie’s first solo show Cycle, written & performed by Rosie & due to be performed at the Theatre Royal Plymouth two days ago, was unfortunately cancelled. I can’t imagine how it must feel to work & plan something two years in the […]
Crown of Air
This poem should be read as the poetic companion piece to my essay Covid-19: Agent of Change, which I posted last week. I haven’t wrote a new poem for ages. I expect on finishing my MA I will write poetry enthusiastically, I still think in it at least, I just don’t stop, as I inveterately […]
Covid-19: Agent of Change
Peering through a lens at the fluid, substratum scale Covid-19 moves through, I can’t help note their physical body’s semblance to World War 2 naval mines, drifting in swells of ocean current. But Covid-19 doesn’t drift, it has agency. It isn’t conscious, doesn’t think, but it does have agency to perform one function: propagate. In […]
A Critical Inquiry into the Natural/Unnatural Tensions of Manipulative Technologies
(This is arguably too long for a blog post, but I wrote it in Word & it was honestly just easier due to time constraints to dump it in one, especially owing to the footnotes. I think the ideas in here, if a little dense, are worth bearing with & attempting to absorb. I have […]
