Between the two things I’ve learnt I will promote some stuff I’m doing.

Apart from a stint in a bookshop, I’ve never really had a job. I don’t come from wealth, so that means I’ve just hustled a lot. With friends and solo, I’ve founded my own companies to put on festivals and offer advertising services … and then for the past seven-and-a-half years I’ve lived by the pen.

Like you I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about how to progress my career. How to make sales. How to reach the right people with my work. How to build an permanent audience. How to get critical attention. How to be appreciated.

None of these things are necessarily wrong to think about. If you want your creative work to chip away at the seemingly unyielding flank of the world, rather than for it to just sit in an Emily Dickinson drawer in a sad afternoon room, then you’ve got to get out there and play the game.

But this is my one, hard won, insight. It’s crippling to think about the big game in its entirety. You’ll feel overwhelmed. You’ll make decisions based on where-you-are-not-yet. You’ll feel small and insignificant because of all those others who have achieved so much.

So the only thing you should think about is the Ladder of Anointing.

I made that name up thirty years ago.

Think of your creative self on a ladder. Each rung represents a person anointing you and your work. Anointing is an ancient religious / magickal practice. You are sprinkled with a perfumed oil or some milk … or some other substance … and thus you have been granted a sliver of divinity from whichever higher power you venerate.

That could be a Goddess or it could be Faber & Faber.

As long as you are making work, all you have to do today, and indeed ever, is figure out how to get anointed by the next rung on your personal ladder.

And this is the exciting thing about this very simple approach … the next rung on your ladder will never feel out-of-reach. Because all it is … is the next rung. Furthermore, the anointer on the next rung will be happy to anoint you, because you’re almost there anyway.

What does anointing look like and feel like? It’s the act of the person or institution with a bit more cultural capital than you saying, publicly, your work is worthwhile. That’s it.

You can then rise on the ladder and carry that anointing with you to the next rung.

Look, I know this seems like a really basic approach to a creative career but from both personal experience and countless mentoring conversations I’ve had with young artists, I know that the sense of mountainous impossibility people feel about how to ‘make it’ can be paralysing.

It also moves one beyond the unrealistic expectation that good work always rises to the top. In an fair world yes, but sadly our fields of cultural production are packed with the pushy privileged who began their creative careers one hundred rungs above you on the ladder. Sorry.

Ignore them. The joy of the climb is the thing anyway. All you have to do is identify who is waiting on the next rung of your personal ladder to anoint you.

And now you should also be considering who is one rung below you. Be creatively generous and reach out with your perfume.

I am performing poetry at the Big Tree festival in East Sussex on Saturday 22nd August.

I’m going to do something which I don’t think you’re supposed to do as a poet. I’m going to treat all of my published work as a single work and edit it into a set I’m thinking of as Howl for the Peat Generation. It’ll be about a big tree.

I’m seven-and-a-half years in of trying to be a poet now … and I do find it surprising that the psychedelic music festivals are anointing my work way before the literary festivals even know I exist.

Maybe the thing about your own personal Ladder of Anointing is that you can rarely see or understand more than a couple of rungs ahead …

I have had a robe made for reading at the festival and another private poetry ritual I’ll be performing in the Cotswolds afterwards.

I commissioned it from the brilliant Diane Goldie who has previously made pieces for Jacob Colier, Jill Scott and Black Thought. Diane offers a beautiful process. Keen eyes will spot King Penda’s sleeves plus the angel from Penda’s Fen, baboon Thoth, some all-time classic UFO incidents and lines from my poem The Supreme Point.

Here is Diane giving me the robe at the inaugural gathering of Black Ribbon, the Symbolist salon I’ve started

This gathering was in the Fitzroy Tavern, but the salon proper (twelve meetings, once a month for year) will begin in 2027.

The salon concept has been anointed by the seventy-five year old and still very relevant institution New Contemporaries, who are helping us with space to host the rituals.

If you would like to be part of the salons then email me yes@thepoetryofitall.com and tell me why you’re a Symbolist and what you’d bring to a salon. Read this to gauge the the vibe.

If you’re reading this on Monday 10th August 2026, there’s one more day left to win a unique copy of The Idyllegy – Will of Margaret edition.

This is copy 93 and has a double page hand-inked by Will of Margaret. Go to WoM’s instagram here and like, leave a comment to enter. Re-share for a double entry.

Now, here’s the second thing I’ve learnt about living creatively.

You know that ancient Chinese saying ‘the best time to plant a tree is thirty years ago and the second best time is today’.

A wonderful provocation to just do the thing, right?

WELL, here’s the beautiful loopy thing about that. The saying can only be traced back to the 1960s. Meaning it’s not ancient at all.

Meaning that hidden within the exhortation is also an admission that you can just start something today and TELL everyone you started thirty years ago.

You won’t have an actual tree but unless people come to your wood, they’ll probably just believe you. And that’s got to be worth a rung or two on the ladder.

Do the work sure, but also remember that you’re playing a game.

The Tree

The tree is an enthusiasm of pulsing chlorophyll,
branches creaking like gossiping harbour boats,
it hosts a begatting of greens – 
the eye-green of a deepriver fish trancing the reed roots
thinking forgotten-mud slow,
begats the spritegreen of atmospheric electrical phenomenon 
only the black satellite can see 
begats gangrene-green,
chop-it-off green, 
bite-leather-and-think-of-the-Lickey-Hills green, 
begats witches’ milk green,
begats the spiky and dark-sermon green of a Christmas wreath.
The tree moves as one thousand unfaithful mouths.
The tree smells like the earthworms’ god,
of ever-shifting shade, of wooded acceptance.
It has a scent so wise and nuanced,
so placidly fungal, so soul slow,
it feels like awareness was always this.
The tree moves like a new mother.

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That’s from the Prelude of Harold Bloom’s wonderful and personal 2019 book Take Arms Against A Sea of Troubles, published at the end of his ninety-year life.

Now I offer you some reading and writing things.

Firstly, two imminent projects. I’ve nearly completed Book One of Prodigiosa! This is a novel, which I’ll be putting out across four books of around 20,000 to 25,000 words each.

It’s a book about time, loss, imagination and a boy who can discover a previously unknown room in any building he visits. If the book were to have an official theme song it would be this. There is a picture I have printed out and pinned above my writing desk to help create this work and it’s the picture below.

I’d describe the style as a cross between Terrance Dicks’ 1970s Doctor Who novelisations and Dylan Thomas’s Map of Love stories. If the subject matter, style, music and image make your feelings wiggle funnily … then perhaps you will take in a copy of the book?

This will be a gifted project. So as FREE as the reflection of the girls above. Email me (yes@thepoetryofitall.com) your postal address and I’ll add you to the list to receive a book. There won’t be many made so get in early.

What do you mean it makes no sense to give away artistic work and I can’t be a proper writer unless I’m sold in bookstores … tsk, read this you capitalist cynic. See! What I’m doing is Blakean babes, and it’s not that I can’t get a publisher. (It is that as well.)

Second imminent project …

In 2019 I invented a new mode of sculpture. A series of twenty-five works, each formed from twenty-five syllables and the raw material of your imagination when you create the described object in your consciousness.

In 2020 – with design from Studio Sutherl& – I staged the first installation of my sculptures. This took place in Covent Garden. Each of the text parts of the sculpture appeared on twenty-five white plinths and within books.

The sculptures in the 2020 installation were about art and consciousness. I’m now working on a second installation, this will be in the Ero guro tradition.

I will be releasing these sculptures five at a time. You can see the first five here as a … Google Slides Doc … the coolest of galleries, I think you’ll agree.

DON’T READ unless you’re a macabre pervert. It’s an extreme artform, exploring both the edges of the erotic and the edges of the grotesque.

If you do sally forth in the spirit of adventure then after the sculptures there is a section of gallery notes providing background and interpretation to each work. But you may find it more enjoyable to not immediately read these notes and let the sculptures be exhibited in your mind for a while.

Once the series of twenty-five sculptures are finished I need to figure out how to exhibit them. Somehow I don’t think the Swiss Church who showed the pieces in 2020 will be up for this particular range.

The Idyllegy – Will of Margaret edition has been out for a month now. You may remember we launched it with an Arcadian picnic in Regent’s Park.

I’m so touched by some of the responses we’ve received about the book so far. It seems to be moving people. Here are a couple I really appreciate.

“There are certain works of art that satisfy in the moment then collect dust to cover up their brief appeal. Then there are works, like this one, that will hold significance for my lifetime. I want to bend the spine and take care of it!

I am reading it slowly, because I want to extend the feeling of surprise, of following a bending trail. When I started reading it, three different but simultaneous feelings arise …

A familiarity, having lived a decade in the dark woods … The same wonderful sinking/lifting feeling of reading Borges for the first time (a very rare and good feeling). And entering a new environment, welcomed in by a local who knows and is made of the materials and events of his home but can only reveal so much to a stranger.

The artwork is what first caught me. It is so highly stylized yet appears as naturally drawn as a new root seeking water. It crosses between symbolism and narration depending on your focus, just like the poetry. There is more than a single experience looking at it.”

And …

“Ever since I finished your beautiful Idyllegy, there's been such an emptiness.”

Also two very cool spaces have taken copies of The Idyllegy – so if you’re in Glasgow you can find it in Good Press and if you’re in Devon you can find it in Field System.

I’m actively trying to get the book into the brilliant Treadwell’s and Watkins, so if you know anyone who works there do extoll and gush. And if you have your own online or physical store and would like to stock this book or any others of mine then I will give you a dreamy deal.

The Idyllegy – Will of Margaret edition is part of my Correspondences series – re-releases of my books in dialogue with artists.

I’m very pleased to be able to reveal my collaborators for my next Correspondences project now. This will be a reissue of my teenage folk-horror Jack and Jill.

When Jack and Jill was first released Rishi Dastidar, poet and Guardian poetry reviewer, said “Jack and Jill delights with its restlessly inventive wordplay … it’s a rollicking recasting of deep time traditions into the now.”

And poet Rushika Wick said “A medieval pastoral in the heart of the 21st century, whilst the intense purity of adolescence and a changeling connection to place is unravelled. This is enchanted and playful writing that holds layers of old English landscapes and excavates archetypes.’

It’s a book very close to my heart. You can think of it as a cross between the sad and slow cereal-eating final days of Nick Drake in the English West Mid Lands crossed with the psychedelic scenes from Arcadia.

Now the new edition will be reimagined by the excellent Stop, Look and Listen studio. This makes it my first release not designed by myself – a relief both for me and my readers. I’m so excited about Marc and Rosey working on this because Jack and Jill contains lots of typography interventions and I know the duo are going to do beautiful things with it.

And just as exciting, the new edition will include artwork by the remarkable musician and artist Millie Turner. Expect an ethereal surrealism.

Here’s a cut from Jack and Jill.

Another day.

Down the hill the sun rolls, like cheese
chased by local brutes – a yearly ritual
performed, initially, with detachment,
as if playacting what life here could be,
though by the time the curdled circle
crashes like milk at the base,
by the time boys are squeezing bones for breaks,
everyone is cheering churned laughing tumbling,
as simple as they should be.

It’s a national sport, watching young men fall,
plenty more in mid land towns who’ll not be missed.

The hill, born ancient each morning,
lets verses of cloudlight,
verses of full light,
from a war poet sky,
recite slowly over.

Just like the faded girls far above are inspiring my current writing of Prodigiosa!, so the creation of Jack and Jill was accompanied by a tacked up print of the below Paul Nash painting.

Also the book does not contain the word ‘and’ except when it conjoins our tragic lead characters. So if you dislike the word ‘and’, then this might be the long poem for you.

Finally, if you’re interested in my writing beyond books and installations then I’m appearing in a few places soon.

I’ll be performing at the Big Tree Festival on the 22nd August in East Sussex and in September I’ll be giving a talk on imagination in J.M.W Turner’s House in Twickenham.

I think I’m going to create a new piece for the festival – a forty minute work about a tree. A sort of Howl for the Peat Generation. And to be invited to give a talk about imagination in the home of Britain’s greatest Romantic painter is ticking more Coleridge cosplay boxes than you can … ahem, imagine.

Apologies, this Substack has been very much about my current projects and me me me. Don’t worry, the next one will be about a revelation I’ve had. A pinning down of the ONLY thing you as an artist, writer or cultural engineer ever need to worry about. I’m calling it The Ladder of Anointment. Will be with you soon.

x

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Three sunshine things for you today.

Firstly, my latest book – The Idyllegy, Will of Margaret edition was launched on Saturday. It’s a long poem about Arcadia, a woman becoming The Marion, land which talks kind and carnival about vagaries of warmth, and skies which bloom a monochrome honeycomb of every innocent blue.

It’s in the poetic tradition of eclogue and this edition has a prose section describing a magickal ritual, which is partly based on the real life Idyllegy ritual a group of us performed in St Brides two years ago, partly based on Crowley’s Energised Enthusiasm essay, and all informed by Schnitzler’s Dream Story.

The book launch took place in Regent’s Park. There was wine, song from Pearl Fish, poetry from the book and some squirrels stole our strawberries.

You may think that that is Will of Margaret sitting next to me, but it is not. It is The Marion. This is her time. (If you want an esoteric, slightly new ageish take on the folklore of Marion then John Matthews’ Robin Hood is a fun read.)

As well as dreamy poetry, the new Idyllegy also has sigilised wallpaper endpapers (my first endpapers!) and three beautiful original artworks by Will of Margaret. Below is a slightly confusing arrangement of production detail photographs, daisies and apples.

You can buy your copy here. Only 100 made, each signed and numbered.

Sunshine two!

I was recently commissioned by spectacle makers to the stars, Cubitts, to write some pieces ushering in the phases of summer.

Ascension was released on the solstice. The film was made by Jethro Marshall and voiced by Max Richter collaborator Sarah Sutcliffe.

Sunshine the third.

In 2023, I was one of the founders, along with the magical David Johnston, of the sunrise gatherings we titled We Don’t Know What This Is.

(A clumsy and literal piece of naming, resolutely uncommercial.)

These gatherings on Hackney Marshes have grown and grown and grown. From five of us to hundreds. Have a look at the Instagram to see how beautiful they are.

The thing I always forget about art and community and making things for the sake of making things is that people can be so generously attentive to sparks of ideas. Like light, good things spread beyond and beyonder.

Now a second UK We Don’t Know What This Is has begun in York – their first gathering was yesterday on the solstice. Which is all very strange for me because I actually live in York, but it took others seeing what was happening in Hackney to make it happen.

A nice little solar return. Not sure if I have many North Yorkshire readers of this Substack, but if so do get in touch and I’ll add you to the York group WhatsApp and hopefully see you at the equinox.

From The Idyllegy …

Improvising, playing the pulse of the field,
rabbit explains joy. Unhinge, hinge.
Mad with sniffing. Runbrown, underbrown
intuitive blips. Sometimes holds like an animal
for umbra beats of raw awareness. Then
heartens again, off to every edge. 

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I set out seven years ago to be a writer. That’s not a single thing though is it? It’s three things.

Doing the writing.
Studying the art of writing.
Telling people you’re a writer so they might read your writing.

My fellow writers will recognised that it’s the third thing which is the most laborious.

But it’s the second thing which is perhaps the least discussed, even amongst writers.

Those of you who have tuned in to my online readings and talks, will have noticed the teetering crinkle-crankle shelves behind me. In this room and elsewhere across the house are piled thousands of books, very many of them either poetry or literary criticism. It’s a collecting impulse and intellectual quest that I consciously accelerated when I set out on my being-a-writer path. At the heart of the quest is the puzzle – what is writing?

What is writing?

A question that sounds easy to answer, but isn’t. Predominantly because, time-loopily, writing grows into and grows out of consciousness. And no one has the answer to consciousness.

Which makes studying the art of writing a rewarding study without end.

Over the past couple of years, as my poetic work becomes better known, I’ve begun receiving more invitations to give talks. In public forums like the ArtULTRA talk at Proposition Studios at the end of last year and in private settings to key groups in organisations.

I really enjoy people’s hunger for discussing an art form we all work with but rarely vivisect. And because the examination of delicious writing has no conclusion, I can enjoyably splay it open and poke enthusiastically at every pulsing wet bit I find.

What do you think the effect is of using ‘people’s hunger’ as the set up to the visceral image that follows? Is writing something to be consumed or something to be operated on? If we clash surgery and gastronomy are you revolted or salivating? Could one write a passage that creates the feeling of disgust and the physical response of your mouth watering simultaneously?

I’d imagine William Burroughs’ light-heartedly sinister Dr Benway has pulled off the appetising / revulsion trick in some book somewhere.

Language is a virus from outer space said Burroughs and that’s certainly one way of looking at it. But there are others, so I’ve now prepared a new talk to consider them.

Thirteen ways of thinking of writing.

Around 45 minutes, followed by an inevitably lively discussion. Email if you want me to visit you. (And do the talk, not just visit you.)

yes@thepoetryofitall.com

I think I can promise that many of the ways I think we can think about writing won’t have been thought about by your circle. So that’s good isn’t it? New thoughts.

Below is a picture from a very small spot I did as part of a much bigger line-up at Sarah Hyndman’s inaugural Sensologists event. You can read all about the event here.

I offered up the tale of our January Bank of England magickal heist. At the heart of that was language as spell and that may well be one of the thirteen ways we can think about writing. You’ll have to book me in to find out.

Quick reminder. I’m launching my next book – The Idyllegy, Will of Margaret edition on Saturday June 20th, 4pm, at a picnic in Regent’s Park. There will be poetry, music from Pearl Fish and very beautiful people just like you.

Let me know if you’d like to come and I’ll add you to a WhatsApp group. Everyone who joins us gets a free postcard of the specially created Will of Margaret image below.

And, yes, I know it looks like those priestesses and Pans don’t need no writing … but I guarantee it was language that got them into whatever tangled and hairy situation this depicts.

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In the water-damaged, wilting-like-a-camembert copy I own, JG Ballard writes the introduction and ends it with a quote from our rhinoceros-moustachioed provocateur ‘it is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.’

Below are eleven diary entries from September 1952, whilst Dalí was painting his Lapis-Lazuli Corpuscular Assumption. I’d suggest the diary entries offer us a mode of consciousness that our incessantly rewarding culture has forgotten about. Let’s call it reverie-edging.

September 3rd, 1952

Today is the anniversary of the Beistegui ball. The memory of that 3rd of September last year in Venice floods me with the keenest anguish, but I tell myself today that I must finish the left foot and begin the ‘radiolorium’, the terrestrial globe of rhinocerontic anguish. In two days I shall begin to paint the ‘niçoids in perspective. Then I shall indulge in the great luxury of an exhausting retrospective contemplation of the Beistegui ball. I shall need to do this in order to lose myself in the luminous and Venetian corpuscles of my Gala’s glorious body.

September 4th

Several times I have to put up a valiant fight to keep the Beistegui ball from monopolising the viscous flow of my musings. I succeed in protecting myself against visions of the ball, in just the same way as I used to circle the table for a good hour when I was a child, dying of thirst before I took a glass of cold water, thereby deepening the chalice of my raving and unquenched thirst.

September 5th

I continue to hold back my memory of the Beistegui ball, just as one holds back one’s urine, and I jump around and at the same time invent a new choreography before my painting. I am also holding back my ‘niçoids’.

September 6th

At the very moment that I was finally going to let my cherished and beloved Salvadorian brain begin recollecting the Beistegui ball, a lawyer was announced. I had it politely explained to him that I was working and would be able to see him at eight o’clock. But to set a limit to my planned contemplation induces a feeling of revolt in me.

[An argument ensues with the lawyer who is thrown out of the house by Dalí]

September 7th

I indulge in a state of ecstatic pre-reverie which paves the way for the Beistegui ball. Already I sense the Proustian correspondence between Port Lligat and Venice. At six o’clock, I observe the projection of a shadow up in the mountains where there is a tower … Everything is tinged with the same pink as on the day of the ball. Tomorrow, for sure, I shall begin my ‘niçoids’ and I shall indulge in my contemplation of the Beistegui ball.

September 8th

I have done it! I have begun the ‘niçoids, sublime with supplementary colours that amount to a paroxysm. There are green ones, orange ones, and salmon-pink ones. Here they are at last, my beautiful corpuscular ‘niçoids. But I am enjoying myself too much, and I push back thoughts of the Beistegui ball till the next day. In the morning I shall do some ‘niçoids’ without dreaming, in complete liberty of thought, but in the afternoon I will give myself up to dreaming about the ball with an obsession for truculent precision. I shall utterly exhaust my languid memories, till I am drained dry.

September 9th

Today I would certainly have given free rein to my thoughts about the Beistegui ball if I had not been disturbed by a police summons to appear on the 11th. It is the result of the incident with the lawyer, and they tell me it may mean twelve months in prison. I postpone my reflections till later and go speeding in the Cadillac to G. to see Ambassador M., whom I ask for advice.

September 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th

In order not to be disturbed we listen to an official document being read one afternoon. I have wasted all these days attending to the problem of the lawyer!

September 15th

The anguish caused by the possibility of twelve months in prison, as a result of the incident with the lawyer, provokes in me a sharp sense of instantaneity. I adore Gala even more than I could have known … When we turn off the light the burning logs illuminate us! It feels fine not to be in prison yet, so splendid that I am giving myself a day’s vacation tomorrow, before indulging in the great, exhausting, supreme, delicious reverie of the Beistegui ball, I have finished the Virgin’s hands and arms.

September 16th

I have started on the first corpuscles of my Assumption. For the time being, no prison, and it makes me savour to the point of paroxysm the voluntary prison of my house at Port Lligat. I am spiritually preparing myself to begin tomorrow, at the stroke of half past three, my reverie of the Beistegui ball.

September 17th

But it wasn’t to be! The reverie of the Beistegui ball has not taken place. I have begun to realise that from this difficulty in beginning a reverie which already provides me with so much pleasure beforehand – and just thinking about it – stems something typically Dalínian and paradoxical, something that is also truly unique. Because I have the impression of a slight pain in the liver which I attribute to the anxiety caused by the incident of the lawyer; but in the end I discover that I simply have a coated tongue. This has not happened to me for so many years that it surprises me very much. So in the end I take half a normal dose of purgative. This purgative is exceedingly smooth. I doubt now that the reflections will take place tomorrow. Nevertheless, the vague idea that I was not in a ‘condition’ to begin my great, hallucinatory and beloved reverie might be explained by my very unusual coated tongue. To have an upset stomach is quite incompatible with the supreme euphoria that must physiologically precede any intense and ecstatic act of imagination. Gala has come in and kissed me before I go to sleep. It is the sweetest and best kiss of my life.

(To be fair, the Beistegui Ball does sound really good.)

Maybe not the party of the century, but definitely a picnic happening this year … I’m launching my latest book on June 20th at 4pm in Regent’s Park, London. There will be rugs, bubbles, beautiful people, poetry, music and an overwhelming sense of pleasure mingled with a yearning for an Arcadia you never really knew.

Will of Margaret, my artistic collaborator on the book, The Idyllegy, will be there and she’s Dalínian in the masochistic ecstasies she undergoes in the preparation of her art, so you should come at least to meet her.

Email me (yes@thepoetryofitall.com) and I’ll add you onto a Whatsapp group so you can find us in the park. No obligation to buy a book of course, but should you desire something gorgeous … it’s here.

In the 1960s W.H. Auden declared radio drama to be a ‘dying art’, but he was an ultra-crinkled idiot.

For me, radio plays and poetry have always been inextricably linked because of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, a tape of the Richard Burton version being played so much in my household, it wore out.

Now I’ve prepared my first audio drama script. It’s an adaptation of a book from last year, Very Special Knowledge. It’s about DNA and angels and secret research facilities.

I’ve had this play printed, 60 copies and it’s one of my Blakean giveaways. Again, email me with your postal address and I’ll send you a free copy. Anywhere in the world. yes@thepoetryofitall.com.

Finally, a poem. I have been dreaming differently over the last month. Suddenly things are arriving fully formed.

A few days ago, the best idea I’ve ever had for a physical installation came to me in a dream. Planning that now for 2027. More soon.

And a few days before that, the below poem manifested. It’s also about a dream, which is a bit meta and egocentric of my amygdala and hippocampus, dreaming about dreaming, but what can I do?

Would it be reported on the news?

If all the mama’s and the mimi’s,
the grandpums and the da’s
appeared in last night’s dreaming
with a warning,
would it be reported on the news?

Prophecy as frozen as mist.

I mean if everyone dreamt the same.
Each of us stood shook and vulnerable
before a venerable ancestor 
who tells us dirtily 
of how the world darkens,
would that be reported on the news?

If it was everyone you see,
that’s not random, is it? Can’t be!
Would they report it? Tell the story?
Because violence does the ratings,
but do the maggot-nagging dead?
Would it be reported on the news?

In the strangled, foggy morning afterwards
you’d need a clockled household to talk.

To quickly tell one another drifting tales,
and for all to be mazed by the coincidence
of our close and perished,
with their underwater mouths
slow and solemn as sonar,
singing ‘there’s barely time, there’s barely time’.

And these households, 
well, they might bleak it to others
in places of mundane work. 
Then maybe the shared dawning 
would reach newsrooms and reach 
those journalists who don’t expect events 
to always look like what they see on TV.
 
It’s a good question, isn’t it?
Would it be reported on the news?

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We were recently talking about where ideas and subjects for poetry comes from. My answer is that a writer must allow themselves to become obsessed.

If we are to accept that we are all antennae tuned into the future – and why wouldn’t you accept that? – it may be that the serious writers and artists are differentiated only by how much they allow themselves to be seized by whatever gets beamed in.

Though, worryingly, my etymology dictionary boils down ‘obsess’ to being under siege by a demon. Gosh, I pity the demons, so easily conjured. Must be exhausting.

Here is some seizing.

Firstly, on Friday May 22nd, in London, I’m talking about the magickal spell a group of us cast at the end of January deep within the Bank of England. You can read about the spell here.

It’s part of Sarah Hyndman’s Sensologists series.

As well as me, speakers include the internationally renowned LJ Rich; Gulp founder Kaye Winwood; Cities and Memory founder Stuart Fowkes; and smell/architecture author Dr Jieling Xiao. Fru Bekefi will talk sensory futures and Oriente Pimentel Aldaz will bring a taste of her sound/smell research at the Crossmodal Research Laboratory with Professor Charles Spence. Co-hosts are food anthropologist Caroline Hobkinson and sensory futures expert Fru Bekefi.

I think it will be a lot of fun, you can get tickets here.

Sarah was one of my inspirations when I set out to bother poetry seven years ago. She’s one of those rare people who have invented their own career. Something which takes a lot of fortitude, patience and, let’s taste the word, obsession.

She began by self-publishing a ground-breaking book about typography (subsequently published by Penguin), went on to advise Heston Blumenthal, and now travels the world talking about the senses. Her Substack is here.

A new edition of The Idyllegy is shooting towards release. This will be on June 21st. Just one hundred copies of the first edition will be prepared. All pre-orders help and the price rises after publication. You can reserve a copy here.

The Idyllegy is a long poem in the pastoral manner. A warm blissful dream of Arcadian pastures, innocent skies and lolling figures. Golden Age poetry which lulls and seduces. Verse which is both ambient and rippling with sensuality. Uncatchable hot nostalgia in a grand eclogue tradition.

This new edition includes three exclusive full-colour Will of Margaret paintings, full colour endpapers designed by her, and her artwork as a gold foil illustration on the front. It also has additional material from me in which I describe an occult ritual.

You want a story about obsession?

Will of Margaret uses a glass pen. It requires ultimate concentration. Hear how she describes it …

‘There is a kind of torture in that discipline, the sustained focus, the fixed grip, the way the body has to be corrected again and again to meet the exactness of the material. Not pain in any dramatic sense, but pressure that does not fully release until the work is done.’

She has now completed two of the three artworks for The Idyllegy. Yesterday, after working for a significant number of hours on the third drawing an ink bubble burst from her glass pen and oozed over the paper. She had to begin all again.

After the book is released we’d like to hold a series of readings / launches. We’re aiming for the first to be in London, but for it to be a …. picnic! I love picnics and I’m sure you do too. If you buy a book then you and two friends can come. There’ll be rugs and food and music and poetry.

Looking for a suitable Arcadian space so if you’re the Head Gardner to an oligarch’s barely-used Kensington townhouse, have the keys to their garden gate and are up for facilitating a brief late-afternoon squatter’s picnic … hit me up Mellors and let’s recreate this.

It has been a year since Field System hosted a mini-retrospective of my first six years’ work in their fantastic art gallery in Devon. Art galleries don’t tend to host unpublished poets so I’m forever grateful to Mark and Milly for believing in the work.

They are possessed with the spirit of the land, so I was delighted to see them mentioned in this Guardian article about Ashburton and the Dartmoor Tors Festival as ‘the heart of the Ashburton folk revival’.

If you follow my printed work you’ll know that pretty much every other book will be about space or UFOs. It’s a lifelong obsession of mine, sparked by reading Timothy Good’s ‘Above Top Secret’ when I was a philosophical tabula rasa.

It’s fascinating now to see the first release of US government files confirm so much of Good’s findings – particularly about the many encounters the Apollo astronauts had with other intelligences.

The passage in Above Top Secret which gave me adolescent shivers were exchanges supposedly picked up by VHF radio hams (and not part of official broadcasts or transcripts) during the Apollo 11 mission.

MISSION CONTROL: What’s there? Mission control calling Apollo 11.

APOLLO 11: These babies are huge, sir … enormous … Oh. God, you wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you that there are other spacecraft out there … lined up on the far side of the crater edge … they’re on the moon watching us.

And now we have these images released and officially inexplicable to NASA or any other scientific agency.

The path of the human species could best be described as a series of decentre-ings. As we encounter new levels of reality we are continually reminded that we are far from the centre of things.

The ontological shock of realising the sun and other planetary bodies do not circle the Earth is the obvious one.

I suspect we have two final decentre-ings to experience.

One – that human intelligence is at the furthest, slowest edge of many other intelligences. We are closer to ants than to species billions of years older than us.

And two, that the brief existence we call life is not the centre of our soul’s experience.

ANYWAY, obviously I’m going to hustle a book of mine now. If you like the UFO question and consider it all very gnostic – then you may enjoy The Idol of the Marketplace. Here’s what poetess and playwright Karina said …

‘We feel it. The Biblical swarm. Choking. Bard’s mouth explodes. Language kinked tight. Bardic tendrils starting the overrun. Psychic warfare licking the holes to “the last, wet second”, the world is in fusion, in heat, sticky, rigged, and we are narcotically unaware, lapping, inviting, prone, illiterate. My favourite book by Thomas yet. He is rattling the bone. Read it.’

Peter J. Carroll died recently. His Liber Null & Psychonaut were books integral to my discovery of Chaos Magick as a practice and way of thinking. Magician and writer Julian Vayne has a fantastic tribute to Carroll on his Substack.

Julian’s Newsletter

Remembering Peter J. Carroll

When Liber Null was first published in 1978, Peter J. Carroll was only twenty-five. It is difficult now, in an occulture where chaos magic has been absorbed, diluted, declared dead, memed, and endlessly repackaged, to fully appreciate how stark and strange that text felt on first encounter. It did not read like a grimoire in any traditional sense, nor d…

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4 months ago · 13 likes · 5 comments · Julian Vayne

I particularly liked this passage.

‘It has been said many times but bears repeating; the core of Carroll’s contribution was the idea, expressed clearly in Liber Null, that belief is not a truth to be defended, but a tool to be used. Magic operates within paradigms, systems of belief, and the magician’s task is not to find the ‘correct’ one, but to become adept at shifting between them.’

Still from ‘Eat Your Makeup’, 1968 film by John Waters with Divine as Jackie Kennedy

In my recent Symbolist poetry collection Black ribbon the Zapruder film is an image that occurs in two poems.

The Zapruder film is twenty-six seconds long and shows the murder of JFK. You have seen it I’m sure. Did you know that after Abraham Zapruder sold the rights to Life magazine he was plagued by nightmares of billboards in Times Square saying ‘See the President’s head explode!’ He never picked up a camera again.

The footage is – as the Manic Street Preachers sang on the song IfwhiteAmericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart – ‘the world's first taste of crucified grace.’

Black ribbon is a collection about reverie. For me Symbolism is a movement about reverie. I hope my forthcoming Symbolist salons will be reveries. The incongruous appearance in the poems of the cruel footage from Elm Street is because I believe it was a pivotal nightmarish vision we are still trying to wake from. And we do this by creating Symbolist imagery to bypasses the current grey-suited CIA construct.

I’ve now realised the Zapruder series of poems should be a triptych – I’d written two poems about memory and evil, but I hadn’t written about hope, so there is now a third. See below. The first two appear in Black ribbon, I might add the third to a subsequent edition.

All the people we’ll never know

The iceberg corridor
of the municipal university
momentarily welcomes horns of sunlight
with no witness, no one there.

The touched walls fade like rain drying
on Dealey Plaza asphalt sixty years on
and tutorials continue
in diffuse and removed agreement.

Demon

In this room is the true demon. 
An abject shred of God spasm 
piteous in the vernix, the birth 
grease, of arrival. Sinews of 
watercolour running 
vertical in arched vermilion pain. 
Clacking lamella occluding the 
rippling guilt of 
being so easily conjured. 
Androgynous chalk-ringed 
eyes and the gasps of a cave 
on the seashore. The gasps of 
snowfall pities. The gasps of silver 
halide in a Kodachrome 
processing of a Dealey Plaza film. 
Heart of marbled meat stuttering, 
galvanised, with abandonment.

An initial few seconds of film showing 
Abraham Zapruder’s granddaughter 
in the garden were additionally processed

Kodachrome sunny and green.
Late autumn joyful laughter
and she runs to a judder.
Did Life also purchase this?
Now I couldn’t say innocence
without you being cynical
but this redemptive cameo
should be studied too.
Kodachrome sunny and green.
Pink autumn silent laughter
and she runs to a judder.

Thanks for reading. Always feel free to email yes@thepoetryofitall.com with tales of your obsessions. x

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(Should you think I’ve miraculously escaped the prison of literary obscurity, rest assured no one has asked me to write this script and it won’t be professionally recorded. It’s just a thing I wanted to experience making. More on the work below.)

And in the adapting, I realised that it was a gnostic drama. And then I realised that everything I’ve ever written is also gnostic. And then, in a discovery that may well be Chapel Perilousian, I realised that everything is gnostic now.

I’m sure the scholars amongst you can improve on the following explanation … but below is my overlook of Gnosticism for those of you not up-to-speed with 2nd century existential stoner chat.

There are three main points of Gnosticism, as far as I understand them.

Firstly, forget the idea that your god created a prelapsarian bliss for everyone which sinful humans then spoilt in some way or other. No, according to the Gnostics, it’s always been terrible. We live in the darkest dungeon of creation. A slum-world fashioned badly by the demiurge (a sneaky sort of junior god) from the materials of the universe emanated by the main and glorious deity who isn’t really paying attention to what the divine baddies lower down are doing.

This ‘false’ world is policed by the horrible archons who’d like to keep us here, I don’t know why, though I think of them as bankers eager to earn a bonus.

Secondly, the fact the archons are trying to keep us here implies that we can actually leave. According to Gnosticism we are all of a dual nature. Much of our nature is the pollution we’ve absorbed from this gone-off world – spiritual plastics in the bloodstream – but some of our nature is a secret glittering mirror-suit, a pure divine spark. Cor. The archons’ busy work is to ensure we remain ignorant of our divine shining bits.

Because, finally, if we can free that divine spark then we can escape all this and transcend towards the real. And we do this by ‘gnosis’. Gnosis is the knowledge of the transcendental god, knowledge that liberates us. Knowledge not from chilly intellectual understanding or yearning belief but from hot hot hot personal experience.

So here’s my Mama Were All Gnostics Now* thesis.

The time of the hero’s journey is over.

It’s a narrative structure that depends on a stable, sensible reality through which all of us ‘heroes’ move through.

Now everything is Gnosticism. All new stories and artworks and interpretations of events are gnostic in form. Everything released yesterday, today and tomorrow is gnostic – overtly or secretly. Knowingly or unknowingly.

The notion of reality as a prison to break out of. The sense of archonic control everywhere. The idea that what we experience is a drama being enacted to distract us.

It’s all all-pervasive and all persuasive.

For example, have you noticed how short the cycle between ‘event’ and accusations of the event being fake is? Even as shots were fired and Trump was being ushered out of the Correspondents’ Dinner, there were live online reactions decrying it as STAGED.

This idea of a ‘drama’ is very important to gnosticism. Life as a theatre, existence as a play, our movements being directed.

But it’s only the first part of the gnostic mindset. It is not enough to notice we’re in a performance … we must find the divine within and transcend.

That is our role. Yours and mine.

Ironically, this is what performance art often sets out to do. ‘Artificial’ actions to shatter illusion of the ‘real’.

A couple of weeks ago I was very pleased to attend an 81st birthday celebration of poet and theatre maker Anthony Howell.

Invited by Dr Naomi Foyle, I read some pieces from Black ribbon – mostly my Platonic ‘room’ poems, and watched Anthony perform in a way that defied age or sense.

Former Royal Ballet ballerina and founder of The Theatre of Mistakes, Anthony Howell is responsible for the best performance comedian Stewart Lee has ever seen.

You can read about that here. And you should.

Gnosticism.

(Also I highly recommend Artaud and the Gnostic Drama published by Scarlet Imprint.)

Here’s an extract from a letter Dylan Thomas wrote on August 24th 1953, which was about a month before he died.

‘Isn’t life awful? Last week I hit Caitlin with a plate of beetroot, and I’m still bleeding. I can’t finish a poem, or begin a story, I chew my nails down to my shoulders, pick three-legged horses with beautiful names, take my feet for grey walks, moulder in Brown’s, go to bed as though to an office, read with envy of old lonely women who swig disinfectant by the pint, think about money, dismiss it as dirt, think about dirt.’

Unlike Dylan, the only poetic thing of mine that has really done the numbers (though without my name attached) is a single line, taken from a longer poem, on the outside of Shoreditch Fire Station in London.

It was only supposed to be up for four days, but four years later it’s turned into thing that people share on social media. A recent post someone made had 90,000 likes. Language is a virus from Old Street.

To me, it’s a gnostic line from a gnostic poem.

Like you, I’m sure, most of the time I feel exactly like Dylan Thomas, singing in his chains like the sea. Bleeding and chewing and mouldering. Envious and thinking about dirt.

But I know that to articulate the dungeon dudgeons is to let the archons win. Instead we must use whatever craft we’ve been given to reach for the divine.

So I’d like to share the radio drama I mentioned previously with you. I think it’s a gnostic work.

Two years ago I released a limited book called Very Special Knowledge. Just eighty copies. The design was redaction-punk which isn’t a thing, but sounds like it should be. Mostly given away for free, each copy of the book came with a unique polaroid photo of ‘The Court’.

I love Very Special Knowledge. It carries a strange atmosphere with it. The book is my way of colliding hauntological sci-fi, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, John Wyndham’s The Trouble with Lichen and Cannock Chase, the forest I spend my childhood in, which is rich in Forteana lore.

Anyway, out of all the books I’ve released to lukewarm interest, Very Special Knowledge had the most lukewarm interest, or the least lukewarm interest, not sure which … basically, very few people read it or liked it. Life, friends, is boring.

Still, I can’t go on, I must go on etc. and Very Special Knowledge has been nagging me for more existence. And so it should.

The day after I published it, I was walking a street and thought ‘I wonder if a synchronicity will happen with this book’ because something strange ALWAYS happens when a book is important to me. As soon as I echoed the words in my mind a girl rounded a corner wearing a black knitted jumper covered in yellow eyes … as simultaneously Amy Hale (this looks good), on the podcast I was listening to, said the word ‘eyes’.

Should you read Very Special Knowledge, you’ll see that Ophanim, those eye-covered biblically accurate angels are central to the tale.

So the girl’s jumper give me the good shivers.

And indeed, you CAN now read Very Special Knowledge … because to give it more life I’ve adapted it into an audio drama. Read it for free here.

There’s a punk song and a podcast and an abandoned military base and a dying man watching TV sci-fi re-runs and angels and a 16th century poet I’ve invented.

Let me know what you think, if you like it I may put it out as a print piece.

It is, of course, gnostic.

Last thing, sunshine.

I fund my poetic work by writing and being a Creative Director for brands. I am my own patron.

Recently I’ve been working on a project which is a collaboration between furniture designers Love Your Home and Turner’s House.

I met Love Your Home when they invited me in to do some writing for them, amongst other things I was let surreally loose on their sofa and armchair descriptions. If you’re in the market for home furnishings you may enjoy me writing on their website about almost anything but home furnishings.

I met Turner’s House – which was the Twickenham home of J.M.W. Turner – when I was invited in to talk to their board about what language can do.

Subsequently, I had the idea of connecting them both to create a super-exclusive capsule collection of furniture inspired by Turner’s residence. Delightfully, this is happening now and I’ve been writing stuff for it. Including material for a souvenir newspaper to mark the new range.

I tell you all this for two reasons. Firstly because on the back of this newspaper I’ve edited a small selection of J.M.W. Turner’s poetry. And who knew Turner wrote poetry? Almost no one, that’s who.

He was a remarkable artist. Always reaching reaching reaching for a sense of the divine which was not obviously visible. He was always attempting to break through the prison of smoke and fog that surrounded him in London towards the beatific light.

And secondly, I tell you about my current relationship with Turner because do you know what his purported last words were?

‘The sun is God’

Gnostic.

*Sorry for the lack of an apostrophe in the title. Did it annoy you? That’s the archons and their invidious implanting of what’s cooly acceptable and what is not. Here are some West Mid Lands mirrored tricksters nudging you towards foolish transcendence.

Likes, comments and shares fellow prisoner, like, comments and shares. That’s the currency in here.

Thomas

x

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Link to my bookshop here.

This is what The Idyllegy is.

It’s a long poem in the pastoral manner. A warm blissful dream of Arcadian pastures, innocent skies and lolling figures. Golden Age poetry which lulls and seduces. Verse which is both ambient and rippling with sensuality. Uncatchable hot nostalgia in a grand eclogue tradition.

In 2024 a group of us staged a literary lecture based on this book which incorporated magickal rituals to raise Pan. Of which someone said “overwhelmed (in a good way) on every level -- intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual, emotional.”

Now I’m releasing a special ‘Correspondences’ edition of The Idyllegy, in collaboration with artist Will of Margaret. Here’s the cover.

There will be just 100 copies, each signed and numbered. Hardback, 66 pages, 16cm x 12cm, green cloth cover with gold foil illustration. Full colour endpapers containing a Will of Margaret sigil.

Three maypole ribbon markers – red, blue and yellow.

Exclusive to this special edition of the book is a brand new prose section with three full colour Will of Margaret illustrations. The prose section outlines, for the first time, the occult ritual that lies behind the events of the poem.

This fresh material is based on Crowley’s Energised Enthusiasm essay, Schnitzler’s Dream Story, and the real life ritual we enacted in 2024.

Here Will of Margaret describes her own relationship with the book – “Since first reading it I have been inside The Idyllegy – it’s a psychedelic pastoral of sex, death, and golden golden golden meadows, which became for me an open vessel. A field in which surges of excess could arrive as vision. A channel held open, into which I was willing to breathe Love.”

The Idyllegy – Will of Margaret edition will be released on 21st June.

Tomorrow we begin selling 30 Early Blossom copies for £30. After these have gone the price rises to £35.

Furthermore! The first ten copies at the Early Blossom price will have been specially blessed in a ritual within Grail legend church Rosslyn Chapel and marked as such.

AND, depending on interest, each of the thirty buyers at the Early Blossom price will receive an exclusive link to an online event in early June where Margaret and I will talk about the making of the book. Making books is an antidote to everything.

In need of summer there is a place sky finds
to rest their modest absence. Land talks kind
and carnival about vagaries of warmth. Sky blooms 
a monochrome honeycomb of every innocent blue.
He is dead, the man who might have had it all.

Small high birdalone, unconcerned with history
in its raw directions. Feathered bone sweeps
a solitary silence, leaves no thread behind,
unlike the wisps of clouds uncombing light –
courtiers of grand diffuse in idle silken service.

Then the densest forest, where walking is contorting,
a ragged conformity to what the wood
insists you ought to be. Sky floats long below.
Thickening between branches of the thickened
is storeyed space – the gods are twists of this.

Once dark fled here, panicking, from the sun.
From blinding prayers, deities fled too.
Through empty leafless chaotic clutches
dark and gods fractal and comfort the other.

When we first make love we know we do not deserve 
the gift. He is dead, the man who might 
have had it all. Sky floats long below
the whole happy stack of universe. And

out. The dampening lattice of tree limb
and whispering weft of black is left
and now the pup of summerheat chases
the meadow into laughing lighted stand still.

Spring Evening by Arnold Böcklin, 1879

This release of The Idyllegy is the second of my ‘Correspondences’ project. Editions of my books paired with visual artists and designers I love.

The first Correspondences was a release of Black ribbon with the wonderful .

Beyond The Idyllegy, I am in discussion with an artist on my folk-horror teenage romance poem Jack and Jill. I loved writing Jack and Jill, it’s heavily influenced by Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, the final days of Nick Drake as described in his father’s diary and those heartbreaking lines from Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where The Time Goes.

And I am not alone,
while my love is near me,
I know it will be so,
until it's time to go.

I have another Correspondences project too, though this one may not be a special edition, but an installation of some sort. A Swiss writer and artist has been spending months with my poem myu whilst recording all dreams, impressions and synchronicities that she receives.

Strangely, myu has as one of its central characters a young woman in Switzerland. (Jung features heavily in the piece.) This particular synchronicity was only revealed once we began corresponding on the work and realised where she lived matched aspects of the poem.

I would like to create more Correspondences.

If you are an artist and would like to work with me on a special edition or a special something else around one of my other books, drop me a line. I have The Supreme Point, Changeling and The Idol of the Marketplace going. Respectively they are about rockets and the breakdown of consensus reality, Aleister Crowley doing sex magick in the Algerian desert, and a gnostic noir detective alien tale. I can send you copies or PDFs if you’re interested in making poetic things together.

Here I am yes@thepoetryofitall.com

The Idyllegy ritual in St Bride’s, Fleet Street, 2024

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I have twelve fascinating people signed up so far. Musicians, magicians, academics, poets, artists, mystics and adventurers.

Many other people have expressed an interest but not responded further when I’ve asked what it is about Symbolism they rhyme with and what they want to both bring and take from a salon. If that’s you, then I’d encourage you to follow up again, hopefully the aura below helps define what you might bring.

If you want a TL:DR it’s this line … the quality of reverie in waking life is not a luxury but essential.

The Black Ribbon salon aura

Such was my life, a dream but how profoundly interesting, how powerfully intense said Gustave Moreau and now I’m thinking about The Black Ribbon salon.

Surrounded by the second industrial revolution’s technological displacement and at war with the left brainers, let’s be garlanded with the spirit of the Symbolists for twelve months. Let’s believe in the never-ending ardour, the mystical green language, gloomy and dreary dawns … and that the quality of reverie in waking life is not a luxury but essential.

Let us know that in the creation of symbols we add to a physical realm suspended adjacently to right where you are now. Let us acknowledge that decadence for decadence’s sake is a waste of life and that decadence is just one way to achieve mystic communion with the divine, as are the study of tombs, perfume, poetry, androgeny, saints, strange music, unrequited love, rose-eating, sexual fluids, the mauve zone, blood, sphinges and chimera.

Let us find the sublime in narrow streets of a city at night. It is found in mountains too, but they’ve been done by the Romantics.

Let’s be melancholic sometimes but happily so, just like the peacock. Let’s avoid the poses, mannered taste and sterility of contemporary academic cultural production and so let’s explore no issues, just make deeply poetic feelings with an additional element of phantasy and caprice. Let’s meet in sacred, intimate naves and never be ironic or designed or post-modern.

Let’s do spells and talk about soul journeys to long-lost epochs. Let’s be moon and not sun.

Let’s muse on whether magickal rituals and artistic practice are twins separated in adolescence.

Let us enjoy the joy of encountering another’s lily-flavoured dreams like we enjoy Jupiter’s unshielded glare and let us birth new unseen ideals and treat beauty as a gateway to enlightenment which should also be terrifying. Let’s be terrified together. Let’s talk of the mysteries.

My own relationship with Symbolism began when I was compiling influences for The Idyllegy live Happening a group of us staged in 2024. This event was a lecture that turned into a dream. Researching Joséphin Péladan’s Salons de la Rose + Croix as part of the study for the experience’s structure resulted in a bit of an obsession.

My Symbolist collection Black ribbon followed … and now the idea for a salon. If you’d like a free copy of the above book then just email yes@thepoetryofitall.com and I’ll post you one.

And if you want to be part of the Black Ribbon salon then please drop me a note. Tell me what the Symbolist movement means to you and what you’d bring to a salon and what you’d take from it.

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Lines there from chapter IV of Austrian Arthur Schnitzler’s wonderful 1926 novella Dream Story.

More on that text later, but like Fridolin I find myself constantly amazed by the people I’m surrounded by. He, however, is baffled and a little bit panicky, whereas I am in awe and joy – though madmen, conspirators and religious sects still feels appropriate.

The more I make poetic things the more I realise it’s not so much the objects and moments that are important to me … but the minds I get to meet along the way.

In January a group of us did a secret magick spell inside the Bank of England. If you ever get the opportunity you should walk in that building during the evening. Marble, columns, statues, mosaics, high-domed ceilings. Add some robes and you’d have Eyes Wide Shut. Actually, we did have some robes.

Like many of my recent projects, I had an initial idea and made that happen but then some quite brilliant people created new things around the original thought, elevating and deepening it. Here are a few …

I’ll begin with this film. It’s on Vimeo and it’s slightly not safe for work. It’s a piece of sex magick. A month before our Bank of England event, the artist hired Kenneth Grahame’s Thames side house for a weekend. She floated down the river in a boat and lay among the river bank reeds whilst 'charging’ the weathervane icon (which was a key component of our Bank ritual) as dawn rose like horns.

If you read my previous post about our trickster Bank heist, then you’ll know Kenneth Grahame – author of The Wind in the Willows and in particular the Pan-featuring chapter seven Piper at the Gates of Dawn – worked at the Bank of England for thirty years. And that our Happening used his mythology.

As you’ll see, the film – called Silent Silver Kingdom – stars the Black Nun. A ghost rumoured to haunt the Bank. Well, she certainly haunted our January ritual. Here she is next to the .

After its trip by the river, the iridescent, holographic foil weathervane made its way to another sanctum – it was everywhere in the Bank, a typically intelligent touch from graphic design duo Stop, Look and Listen.

The inspiration came from a real weathervane that had been at the top of the Bank of England for 200 years, connected to a wind dial in the Bank’s Court Room. During the 19th century it allowed bankers to see which way the wind was blowing and therefore predict if trading ships would be coming into the London docks.

Because our ritual was about guiding money to flow towards artists and peacemakers, Stop, Look and Listen ingeniously turned the weathervane into a symbol of the direction society chooses to propagate its money, as well as a lovely reference to Kenneth Grahame’s breeze in the reeds.

Before we retired to a private room in the Bank for the obscured spell casting, we staged a public installation. We had four original artworks (more on those in another post) and four museum artefacts. These were displayed on eight easels correctly aligned to points of the compass and arranged in a circle directly underneath the rotunda, a recreation of the one in John Soane’s original stock office. The cardinal and ordinal points of the compass were laid out on the floor in vinyl. All typography was taken from UK bank notes and the artworks on paper were fixed with money clips, designed not to crease notes … but now preserving original art.

Graphics were applied in the holographic foil, inspired by the security foil on banknotes – but also the psychedelia you find in Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Stop, Look and Listen’s ideas made the Happening shimmer. You can follow them on Instagram here.

Beyond the Bank, though thematically congruent, I’m currently preparing a new edition of my book The Idyllegy. That’s all about Pan too.

It was released a couple of years ago and you may have come to the one-night-only Happening in St Brides which was a lecture that turned into a ritualised dream … there was rose eating, the sounds of the planets and legendary actress Kika Markham in a beautiful short film by Francesca Way.

The new edition is the next in my Correspondences series where I re-release my texts in collaborations with artists. The reworked Idyllegy will be hardback with a green cloth cover with a gold foil cover illustration and full colour artwork inside by my frequent conspirator Will of Margaret. It’s looking really beautiful.

There will also be some brand new material in the form of prose section outlining a magickal ritual. If you did come to the The Idyllegy experience, you may recognise aspects. This additional writing is also influenced by Schnitzler’s Dream Story, the ritual scene, and Crowley’s essay Energised Enthusiasm.

The new edition will be limited to 100 signed and numbered copies. Pre-sale will open in a few weeks but you’re welcome to email me and I’ll build a first-come-first-served list.

And talking of ritualised gatherings … my plans for a Symbolist salon are progressing excitingly. I’m looking and visiting some elegant potential venues in London (all suggestions welcome). The salon will be once a month for just twelve months.

There has already been a fantastic response from people interested in being part of this. Twelve evenings of performance, magick, mystery, art, conversation and, most importantly, new creations. New creatures of the imagination.

Message me if you want in. All free obviously. As well as writers, magicians, artists, musicians, and academics I would love to involve a perfumer interested in invoking. And a rare book dealer with Symbolist rarities to share. And a Catholic priest, a ribbon-maker, someone displaced from the village to the city by the Industrial Revolution, a Freudian psychoanalyst and the reanimated corpse of Gustav Moreau. Would love to involve YOU.

Here’s a primer on Symbolism. If you like love, fear, anguish, death, sexual awakening, tombs, hyacinths, mysticism and unrequited desire … and agree with me that we need more of all this in the cold blank face of computers computers computers computers computers come join us.

Böcklin’s Tomb’ by Ferdinand Keller, 1901 - 1902

Finally, much love to and for creating the Mycelium Parish News. A round up of all the most Discordiansimy things happening in indy culture in 2025. Delighted that a few of my projects and books are included alongside some favourites like Alan Moore, John Higgs, RAW, Stone Club and many others. You can buy your copy here.

A tomb conceived

The garden corner tomb languishes
in declines of light. Creatures,
the colours of flowers, peer out.

Maybe we’ll go hallooing
through the belling woods,
through the violining branches,
through the longbow woods,
maybe we’ll go hallooing.

Creative child forms the darkest place.
Four cardinal ink pots. Hands of a clock.
A black ribbon around their neck.
Circle of sperm. A broken hyacinth.
Ghosts in pre-war ivory beetles. Settled airs.
Arranged pages from diaries of nobodies.

Time happens. Now the house is 
a pure posy of weariness nocturnal.

Creatures, the colours of flowers.

Poem above from Black ribbon

My commercial Creative Director portfolio is here. If you hire me to do a project then – as well as getting writing that’ll make you famous – you’ll also be funding all the art above. Be more Medici tesoro.

My artistic portfolio and bookshop is here. Publishers and galleries – just imagine how good it would feel to be the first to ‘discover’ me and how creatively I’d push our collaborations.

My Instagram is here and I post daily influences and inspirations.

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I discover a rich seam of poetic inspiration in exploring what consciousness feels like for the non-human – whether that’s a hill, grey alien or self-aware abyss.

So I find the question of whether the latest batch of AI Uriah Heeps are conscious … an absolutely absorbing one.

In 2022 I wrote a piece – now available to read on my website for the first time – called The dataset’s dream.

It was a commission for the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) and was originally for an installation with artist Bryony Ella.

I really love this work, it was sad and joyful to write. It's about what it is to be in the world. It's about animism. It's about biodiversity loss. It's about the fear scientists have and the maybe-futility of documenting degradation. It's about dreaming.

I hope you enjoy reading it.

‘Butterflies’ by Odilon Redon, circa 1910

Now, I'm currently working on turning The dataset’s dream into a print piece and event with the designer and thinker (and Emmy winner) Brian Williams.

The book we’re creating is going to be gorgeous, probably in a limited edition high-spec piece with gold foil circuit boards, plus a regular print version.

As ever, I have the dream of a publisher collaborating with me on the project so tell someone to tell someone if you know someone … but I’m also quite prepared to create and back this myself.

However, I do think the publication and surrounding launch event would appeal hugely to a technology company or science institution keen to be part of the debate around digital sentience, bio-diversity loss and consciousness. I can promise you a beautiful experience.

So if you’d like to back the work (or sell it in your store or gallery) come flap your wings in my face.

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I’m considering starting a salon and naturally you are invited. It will be once a month in London for one year. I haven’t found a location yet but assume a room in a pub.

It will be called The Black Ribbon and it will be for those of you who think the Symbolist art movement is having a second coming.

I find my artistic work increasingly glamoured by Symbolism. This began when a group of us staged the one-night-only Idyllegy happening. My idea for that was a lecture that becomes a dream. Conspirators Will of Margaret, Sarah Kershaw, Francesca Way, Mario Epsley and helped turned it into so much more.

Whilst creating The Idyllegy evening I learnt more and more about Joséphin Péladan and felt a kinship. Which led to an addiction to the Symbolists over the past couple of years. I keep trying to kick the habit by staring at Brutalist concrete architecture and considering Swiss typography, but something about all those hyacinths, tombs, androgynous terror, sex-magick, lonely houses and heads of John the Baptist keep pulling me back in.

Last year’s poetry collection, Black ribbon, was deeply informed by the movement.

Ok, here’s what I mean by Symbolism, though you could have an infinite number of monkey art critics typing on an infinite number of typewriters … and *still* they would struggle to come up with a final definition of Symbolism.

Perhaps that’s one of the fascinations for me. It’s a reverie of a philosophy. Difficult to pin to the butterfly board.

But I find it the last movement, moment, when decent mysticism flourished in the artworks.

Romanticism is glorious of course but obsessed with the idea that primal nature is where salvation lies. Occultism is delicious but *can* be a bit results orientated. Everyone likes Decadence right, but sometimes all that nihilism wearies the soul.

For me Symbolism is the resulting spooky homunculus of those three cauldrons.

I love the Impressionism and Abstraction that came afterwards as much as the next hipster but I can’t help thinking we forgot about eternal myths of the psyche along the way. I forgive the Modernists because they’d had all that World War death to trying and blank from their mind, but cold collage is never going to heal you Mr Eliot.

In Symbolism I find beautiful occultism, serious mysticism, the power of the reverie, the truly ungraspable, the Romantic’s Sublime, the delightful darkness of the Decadents, and a genuine contending with the pressures of finding meaning in an increasingly left brain world.

Symbolism arose partly in response to the displacement enforced by big industry and I strongly suspect that current technological displacements will usher in a new variation of the old mode.

So that’s my understanding, but I’m not an academic, never had the Latin, and it’s probably all wrong. Your definition may be very different, I’d love to hear it.

Still, over the past couple of years I have been releasing poetry I’d judge as heavily Symbolist, as well as creating – with my amazing group of conspirators – those live poetic experiences that try to pull dreams into a one-night-only consensus reality.

So, fancy coming to a salon?

A place for artists, musicians, writers, academics, poets, magicians to share work or research with each other ... and possibly create new pieces together.

New joiners welcome as the group evolves.

No obligation to turn up every month, but perhaps miss two gatherings in a row and you’re out. Sometimes it’s nice to feel scared and under obligation.

If you’re still curious then email yes@thepoetryofitall.com

If you do fancy it then I’d be interested in what your own personal favouring of Symbolism is, how it manifests in your current work and what you’d like to both contribute to a salon and take from it.

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Soane’s design for the bank is often considered his supreme achievement, a Neoclassical confidence of domes, courtyards and a dramatic central rotunda, all bordered by the imposing wall which is the only aspect remaining today

That’s because, in the 1920s, his one storey building was almost totally demolished to make way for a bigger, taller Herbert Baker design. An action Niklaus Pevsner described as ‘the greatest architectural crime to befall the City of London in the 20th century’.

The picture is from that demolition. A presiding caryatid being lowered from the heights of the dome and into the rubble of memory.

You’ll know the term genius loci I’m sure. Classical Roman. The protective spirit of a place. Often depicted on buildings as reliefs or statuary with items such as horns of plenty or libation bowls. In an enchanted universe, everywhere with its own deity.

Following the event I and group of regular conspirators staged in the Bank of England on January 22nd, I’ve been thinking about the spirits of places that were present in all of the poetic experiences I’ve put on since 2019.

There’s the spirit of the Devon fields we’re performing Our Longland Is Dreaming in. This is a four-year cycle of a piece about the medieval poem Piers Plowman and about soil and revolution.

There’s the cool Camden TV spirit in Park Village Studios where we staged Game Six in 2022.

The powerful and ancient spirit that inhabits the City of London, which we enclose in the world’s largest faery ring every Leap Day.

The welcoming spirit of 150 years of Swiss Protestant worship in the Swiss Church in Covent Garden, where I staged Twenty-five sculptures in five dimensions, my first ever language piece in 2019.

The spirit of the Richmond Woods that hosted Beginning Today We’ll Rebuild The World From All The Good Little Feelings Everyone Is Having or The Dataset’s Dream.

The spirit of Aleister Crowley, Leila Waddell, and Victor Neuburg’s famed Rites of Eleusis. Rites which I told attendees to The Idyllegy in Bridewell Hall, off Fleet Street, had been performed in that very room in 1910, though that was an enjoyable lie.

And the, let’s be honest, rather grimy spirit of the basement in Islington where we staged The Abyssmass Variety Show in 2024.

Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! There’s Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo! He’s illustrated here by twin fantasy artists the Brothers Hildebrandt.

If you know your Lord of the Rings lore, you’ll know that Tom Bombadil is the most mysterious – and possible most powerful – character in Middle Earth. He might be God. Or maybe just a mad trickster immune to the ring. His entrance and exit in the book is so strange and confusing that Peter Jackson famously cut him out of the films completely … even though he might be the key to everything.

And he’s definitely the genius loci of the whole land.

What I’ve been thinking about – when I’ve been thinking about genius loci in relation to the live happenings I’ve been staging – is that often the main creative decision is whether to work with a genius loci or somehow redirect it.

Once you’ve decided that, the language and ideas will take their natural form.

Working in Devonshire fields which are re-wilding, the language of Our Longland Is Dreaming took on sticky, burrowing, flowers-from-an-ox’s-carcass quality, language that acted like tree roots picking up the throb of a rave.

Working in a Swiss Church still actively used for worship, with wafer-and-wine light swallowing down from high windows, the language for Twenty-five sculptures in five dimensions became an exercise in reverence and stillness.

These are language experiments working with the protective spirit of their places.

But the Bank of England job last Thursday was different. This was about persuading the spirit there to act and protect differently.

I still can’t believe I was invited in really. Well, I can. These poetic experiences I’ve been doing are supercool and strange and let people connect with poetry and language and living poetically in ways we all yearn for and culture rarely offers … BUT, I didn’t expect to go so rapidly from mountebanking and mumming my words around on my own shilling to suddenly being waved through security and asked to be a freak in the UK’s central bank.

The opportunity for some hard, forceful spirit work was too good to miss. To take the spirit of money, the genius loci of the Bank of England, a spirit given egregoric agency through centuries of worship and offerings, and ask it magickally and very nicely to change course.

Money goes to rapacious people. It flows towards the unpeaceful and the upholders of harsh systems. It seems happier with those who would burn the Earth, rather than those who would fill the Earth with music and love.

So through poetry and song and art and a very very powerful sigil created by my accomplice Will of Margaret, we cast a spell.

I don’t mean ‘cast a spell’ the way people talk about charming poetry readings in back rooms of pubs, I mean we actually cast a spell. We asked for and were given a private room, deep in the heart of the Bank of England, filled it with fifty proper witches and wizards, and for thirty minutes cast a spell to ask the spirit of money to propagate towards art and peace.

The many flavours of pre-ritual pilgrimages, anointing, ceremonies and talisman creations leading up to those thirty minutes are a whole other post. Let’s just say people were sexy and funny and inventive and weird. And the magick was studiously and seriously done.

On the left are the transcendent choir Sorori. Click on their name for their Instagram and some footage of their cleansing and exciting of the space.

On the right is before, during and after the spell being cast.

Afterwards we went to The Globe pub in Moorgate. I chose that particular inn because it is on the site of John Keats’ birthplace and Keats said ‘all writing is a form of prayer.’

After drinking a pint of Guinness I collapsed. A full on faint. The world slowly turned into a mosaic, I struggled to breath and incrementally the darkness rose up as I slid down the wall I was leaning against outside. Remember the caryatid being lowered into the abyss at the beginning of this story? Well, it was like that. Reality rubbled and I vanished.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
         My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

YES, exactly, John Keats.

Science would say that I was stupid to drink alcohol on top of the industrial opiates I’d been taking all day to get me through a tedious pain whilst making magick.

But magick would say spells take it out of you and perhaps working to persuade stubborn spirits to switch allegiances may leave you temporarily overdrawn on the etheric plane.

Film by David Johnston.

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There are some lines in my poem Jack and Jill that go …

Nothing good ever comes from a letter,
Jack’s Aunt Hilma used to say,
looking symphony-wistful at photographs
of people having dreams they are dead.

But the now-dead person was wrong, my poetry isn’t nostalgic, the very last thing I yearn for is the past because the open quarry of the future is so hardscrabble thrilling.

Actually what I’m fascinated by is the dream quality of childhood and adolescence … and how best to ingest it daily in the face of roof repairs, butterflies disappearing and voting slips.

If you feel exactly the same as me then the very purest element of your soul has a pinballing qualia analogous to the below footage and consequently each day involves a lot of pretending.

Someone else who kept rowing back to the beautiful surrealism of our forming selves was Kenneth Grahame.

If you came to The Idyllegy event, which a group of us staged off Fleet Street a couple of years ago, you would have heard me talk about Kenneth Grahame. Specifically the amazing tension at the heart of his most famous work.

Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, worked at the Bank of England for thirty years. He rose to be Secretary, third in command. He didn’t really like it. In his last few years he was having anxiety dreams about having to give banquet speeches in the City, but without any notes. His Chairman disliked him and was intent on removing him from the organisation.

Yet during this time Graham was also writing The Wind in the Willows, which includes the, sometimes excised, chapter seven – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Possibly the most mystical piece of writing in all of English children’s literature, in which the rat and the mole meet the great god Pan.

The contrast between existing in the stifling corporate atmosphere at the heart of Edwardian capitalism … whilst also conjuring up the quintessential English Arcadia and visions of pagan entities is profound.

Syd Barrett was a fan of chapter seven, naming the first Pink Floyd album after it.

My next poetic experience is happening inside the Bank of England on January 22nd, between 5:15pm and 8pm. It’s called So beautiful and strange and new.

Here’s what the event is about.

It’ll take place in the below room, though not in the Edwardian period. But actually, as we’ve talked about before, time is loopy, so maybe it is taking place then as well. Grahame must have got his ideas from somewhere!

I’ve curated a small exhibition of four artists, each showing a single work on paper which will respond to a piece of ephemera from Kenneth Grahame’s time at the bank.

These artists are Bryony Ella, Greg Humphries, Will of Margaret and Adam Cartwright – do give them a follow. Installation design is by Stop, Look and Listen Studio.

I’ll be giving a public talk about money and Pan and Kenneth Grahame and art. Members of the public can take part in a guided meditation I’ve written.

The choir Sorori will be performing. Their voices are the music of all the rivers in that echoey old counting hall. Sorori is a four-part female vocal collective formed by Carolina Cury, Millie Turner, Yiolanda Loizou and Rossana. Their work unfolds as a collaborative gathering of music and sisterhood, weaving together each member’s distinct soundworld and cultural heritage. Their performances serve as an invitation into a shared space of exploration, experimentation, ritual, and emotional vulnerability.

And finally, there will also be an *intense* private poetry ‘reading’ for fifty people in a secret room deep in the Bank of England, though I’m afraid that part has sold out already.

This ‘reading’ will be, if we pull it off properly, a magickal act. I’ll tell you about what happens after the event

Before the evening opens I think some people will be doing a mini-pilgrimage across London, following the path of the ancient river that runs underneath the Bank of England. Follow my Instagram and I might share more about that.

Speaking of pilgrimages … we’re hoping to create the second of four Our Longland Is Dreaming Piers Plowman rituals in Devon this summer. (The image above is from the inaugural event last year.)

I’ve got to write part two first, but more importantly figure out how to fund it.

If only a group of people were about to do a magickal working deep inside a central bank to ask the egregore of money to flow towards art and not war. Until then though, tell me how you’d fund a ritual in a field in Devon? (We have the field.)

I mentioned this before but it now has material in it.

I’ve begun a separate Substack purely for my writing. I realised that lots of people following me here were doing so because they were interested in my projects or commercial work and didn’t really care about the actual poetry.

Chrysalids is free but private. Sign up and then I’ll approve you. For the bulk of 2026 I’ll be sharing chapters of my first novel, Prodigiosa!. The initial two episodes are up already.

Prodigiosa! is a term meaning ‘unnatural marvels’ which is found in 12th century Yorkshire cannon and historian William of Newburgh’s great work Historia rerum Anglicarum. Alongside the history of English politics and affairs, William also recorded ghosts and green children and other spooky stuff under the prodigiosa heading.

As you read Prodigiosa! the only bits of contextual blurb you may need is that the hero is a boy called Cam who can discover a forgotten room in every building he visits. If he came to your house today, he’d find a door to a space you knew nothing previously of. Quite the skill, I’m sure you’ll agree. What would be in YOUR room? Ghosts I bet.

For the past year or so I’ve been working on a new restaurant brand in East London.

It’s being launched by the founder of a very famous, super-loved chain who is collaborating with a Michelin-starred chef and it’s going to be cool.

My main work has been creating the new restaurant’s voice, but I’m also curating bookshelves in the ‘library’. If you have any recommendations for East London publishers, authors or books I should be considering then do leave a comment.

In 2026 I’ll be continuing my Correspondences series – pairings of my books with visual artists to release very limited edition bundles.

Correspondences began last year with an artistic response by to my book ‘Black ribbon’ (the bundles sold out in twelve hours) and later this year Will of Margaret and I will release a new edition of The Idyllegy with her hot, dark art. I’m also engaged in a fascinating Correspondence with a Swiss poet / artist who is recording her dreams as she muses on my book myu.

I’d LOVE to hook-up with three other artists who would be interested in responding to either The Supreme Point (about space rockets and the breakdown of consensus reality) or Changeling (a fin de siècle piece about sex-magick and the abyss) or The Idol of the Marketplace (a gnostic noir about UFOs).

I can send you the text if you haven’t read the works and are interested in collaborating.

Spring Evening by Arnold Böcklin, 1879

Also – and this is a long shot because I don’t know if I know anyone posh – but I have an idea about turning the aforementioned work, The Idyllegy, (Arcadia, Pan and the mournfully-filthy dreams of a dying elder woman) into a theatrical performance in the Arcadian landscape of a grand house.

(I wrote chunks of The Idyllegy whilst lounging in the grounds of Castle Howard – Brideshead Revisited et in Arcadia ego and all that.)

I’ve been revisiting The Idyllegy recently and think the poem will make a splendidly strange meadow-horny live experience.

Drop me a note if you’re a Duchess or have a big garden to spare.

Ok, last thing. In 2025 I held very regular ‘mentoring’ calls with people who wanted to talk through their own artistic practice and how to balance it with all the other completely pointless, not-making-art, stuff we all have to do.

‘Mentoring’ is a ridiculous word not only because I’ve learnt as much as anyone from the wonderful conversations, but also because so many of the connections have lead to actual projects or meetings.

If you think a conversation with me might offer anything in 2026 then here I am you sweet, dreaming youth.

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This is just to say I have begun a new Substack. I have done this for two reasons and here are those reasons now.

Firstly, I want a place to preview new writings in 2026. Particularly the novel, Prodigiosa!, I’m working on. I’ll release chapters as they are written.

I suspect most people follow this current Substack for news about my projects and live poetic experiences and thoughts about language and magick rather than my actual literary endeavours, so I’m splitting those off elsewhere. The new Substack is free but private, so subscribe and I’ll approve.

Secondly, and perhaps of interest to those of you living a life of art and making, a couple of years ago I was really frustrated at my lack of success as a writer. No publisher or critic will touch me, despite me having enthusiastic readers across the world.

Then I realised that the problem was not that I couldn’t find the hidden doorway into the publishing castle … but rather that I didn’t actually know what I wanted. What on earth does ‘success’ mean? It’s a misty puff of vagueness and if you embark on a creative life without knowing what you want, well then, you’ll always be seeking something just out of your questing grasp.

So I thought to put a number on my writing career.

And so, by the time my body-of-work is complete (a polite way of saying by the time I die), my hope is to have thirty to fifty deep readers of my work. A figure which feels simultaneously easy to achieve and improbable.

The new Substack is a way of keeping score on my target.

Chrysalids will be a place for people who like my writing (and who might want to gamely volunteer to be one of the thirty to fifty) to read brand new work before anyone else – including my work-in-progress novel Prodigiosa!, receive exegeses of previous work, and be first in line to put their name down for my regularly released limited edition publications. Sometimes these are gifted in the Blakean tradition, sometimes they are sold. Either way, by subscribing to Chrysalids you’ll get first option.

The name Chrysalids is taken from my favourite book, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I’ve written a celebration of the cover of my favourite edition of that book here.

The logo of the new page (and colophon in my books) is my own inked hand, plus an extra digit, in tribute to that 1964 cover and the idea that runs through all of Wyndham’s writing – what makes us different is what makes us vital.

If you enjoy my writing I hope you’ll join me on Chrysalids. It may only be a handful of people for a while but who knows, it could be fifty by the time I hatch into the next world.

In 2022 I made up Abyssmass. It’s on December 6th. It’s the one day in the year when people (who celebrate) consider their personal abysses AND the magick that always lies on the other side.

Last year I and a group of brilliant conspirators staged the Abyssmass Variety Show in Islington. There were readings from Milton about Satan’s tumble by Diane Hutchinson, a remarkable drag act Dirty Dr John Dee from Francesca Way, a brief and learned history of the abyss by Carys, a beautiful ‘Wandering Womb’ act and Cosmic Dancer performance from Sarah Kershaw, hilariousbleak puppetry from Oliver Smart, a fantastic one-act play from Jordana Belaiche, a traditional funereal song from Dan Sumption, a spell composed in old English and played on the harmonium from Sophie Haxworth and an intense magickal musical threshold ritual from Will of Margaret.

As you can see, marking Abyssmass in your own idiom is very much encouraged.

Poster design by Brian Williams, art by Will of Margaret

On December 6th this year, please do consider doing something magickal and strange and tangentially related to traversing the dark spots in life on the way to transformative glory.

I marked the first Abyssmass in 2022 by releasing Changeling, a long poem in the form of a three-act absurdist play. Changeling is about the magicians Crowley and Victor Neuburg journeying into the Algerian desert in 1909 whilst doing Dr John Dee’s Enochian Calls and having lots of sex.

My best guess is that it was on December 6th 1909 that they performed a climactic ritual and met Choronzon, demon of the abyss. There was a battle and who’s to say if they triumphed … but things were never the same again. But things are never the same again anyway, whatever you do.

I don’t have any copies of Changeling to give away at the moment and can’t afford to have new ones reprinted, BUT tomorrow (Abyssmass) I will break my own print-only rule for one day and send anyone wanting to read the exciting abyssy tale … a PDF. Just ask.

Let me know in the comments what you’re doing for Abyssmass? It’s so lovely that this tradition hasn’t been picked up by capitalism yet and so it’s still just between us freaks.

Though of course, it’s only a matter of time before marketeers catch on and we start seeing little dangling void decorations in supermarkets and the novelty songs get released (Last Abyssmass I Gave You What’s Left Of My Ego) and Richard Curtis makes a schmaltzy film about depressed people in London undergoing profound and significant individuation.

Thank you to everyone who came to my talk in Bethnal Green on the 1st. Someone brought me honey. The questions were mad. Two people left half-way through.

It was an honour to be the inaugural ArtULTRA Presents speaker.

My talk was about the specific kind of intense poetic experiences I’ve been staging for the past seven years now and, as ever, I was a little suprised that no other poets (apart from the ever intrepid and curious Naomi Foyle) or people from the literary / publishing worlds are particularly interested in what I do … BUT, also incredibly grateful and surprised that 100-odd non-literary scene folk signed up to a talk about the consciousness-expanding qualities of difficult language and poetry.

If you like the glamour of poetry and thinking, then invite me into your gothicky life / place of rest / village WI Hall / hedge fund office and I’ll do a turn – yes@thepoetryofitall.com

I once read that Tim Smit – creator of the Eden Project – has a rule to accept every third invitation to speak he ever receives. Well, it’s 2025 and inflation inflation inflation – I accept *every* invitation I get.

If you’d like to see what Tim Smit once said about me … then visit my website.

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Here’s a shortish post about three things.

Firstly, a tender reminder that I’m giving a talk in Bethnal Green on Monday 1st December. I’m calling the presentation In defence of poetic experiences or what did *you* do in the reality war?

It’ll be about where I’m trying to take poetry and about magick and about consciousness and about forty-five minutes long. One hundred seats and I think there are about ten tickets left. Totally free.

I’m being hosted by Alice Black, Trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts and former director of London’s Design Museum, who has been an incredible early supporter of my artistic pieces.

Get your spot here.

Secondly, more details on the novel I am working on. I’ve never written a novel before and I now have 10,000 words. I think it’s turning out to be beautiful and, regardless of whether it finds any readers, it’s a world that I never want to leave. I might write it forever.

I’m going to release it on 14th April because that’s the date of Terrance Dicks’ birth, and I would never have started writing if it wasn’t for discovering his Doctor Who novelisations in my local library.

I’ve made a cover for the book, which will be called Prodigiosa! There it is against some stage flummoxing. The cover will be purple cloth with black foil and a tiny sticker of a devil.

Someone I don’t know messaged me today, having seen this cover on my Instagram, and she asked me if the ‘font was ironic’ before continuing ‘I thought you were a designer?’

The thrill and the terror of being an amateur is that I do not have to care about comments like this. I always make the cover of a book early on in the writing because it isn’t used for being noticed in bookshops, but for helping me hold an atmosphere in my nerves for as long as I need to imagine new things.

Prodigiosa! begins like this …

Sun was alms. Sun was daily alms. For forty-three years the order had carried their tales of levitation and their old hard knees and their clay pots, beer-stained. In lay down your life grace they carried them from settling site to settling site, though never were any settling.

Then here and how do abbeys begin? They paced out length and width on the first day. On the final day they were thankful for stone, for he is stone, he feels the stone of incompletion lodged slowfrantic in his heart.

Despite the unironic cover, I hope you’ll be interested in supporting it when it emerges in April. If I’m doing well commercially at that point, then I’ll make one hundred copies and give them away for free. If commercial work is as dry as an irony-drenched design, then I’ll put it up for sale. That usually shifts thirty to forty copies.

Finally, plans for my Bank of England event on January 22nd 2026 continue to flourish like a coin-drunk trader in a city flat sheened like a slug in the dew or like a mass of reed roots lurking beneath the waterline on the river’s edge.

Plans are planning is what I mean to say.

I’m delighted to welcome into the Happening’s fold Rosey Trickett and Marc Spicer – my fellow conspirators on the world’s largest faery ring a group of us plant every four years around the Square Mile.

Marc and Rosey are creating some gorgeous visuals for the event.

This is your summoning. I’m still looking for about ten more witches and wizards who would like to take part in the event. We have about twenty-five so far and I’ve been holding briefing calls over the past week.

I can’t tell you anything more here, but can share a couple of the notes I received after the last briefing.

‘Just want to say that is a genius idea and I am so excited to be a part of it.’

‘This IS amazing ... you’ve clearly drawn it towards you with your magic … a beautiful thing.’

Email yes@thepoetryofitall.com to be part of this.

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As I’ve mentioned before, I use a lot of hypnagogic states. Allowing the images and voices to flood in, transcribing and then fashioning them into language. I did this intensely with my long poem myu and my Symbolist collection Black ribbon.

And recently I tried an even more active form of channelling. Earlier this year I took a few days retreat in a cabin in a wood in the Malvern Hills to meditate and try to contact William Langland – medieval author of Piers Plowman – in order to use whatever images I received in my Devon Happening Our Longland Is Dreaming.

Strangely, despite my meditation in those Malvern Hill sessions being very focussed on matters of the middle-ages and soil turning, I also received a bizarre flash of the UFO gnostic noir idea of my last book The Idol of the Marketplace. The whole thing arriving in an instant.

Yet the thing about letting go and working with whatever images turn up is that you have to get over the idea that (a) if the images rising to the surface are from your subconscious, then your taste might be terrible … or at least at odds with polite society or (b) if the images are beaming in from elsewhere then, well, Chapel Perilous may possibly be past the next clump of trees in your personal forest.

The Chapel Perilous, Thomas Mackenzie‘s 1920 illustration in Arthur and His Knights

So it’s always a small encouraging fist-bump from the universe when images you’ve scooped from the aether and placed in pieces of writing receive – a few years later – an echo in other parts of culture.

On December 6th 2022 I released a piece called Changeling. It’s a single poem in the form of a three-act absurdist play. It’s about Crowley and Neuburg doing sex-magick in the Algerian desert in 1909, and it’s about séances and the abyss. Writing it was the most magickal literary experience I’ve had to date, with lots of synchronicities.

Because December 6th 1909 is the date I guessed Crowley met the demon Choronzon and had his most abyssy experience of the desert working, I designated December 6th every year as Abyssmass. The one day of the year when we think about our own crossings. Last year a group of us staged The Abyssmass Variety Show in Islington.

One of the stranger ‘channeled’ aspects of Changeling is the presence of Michael Jackson. He anachronistically appears in each of the acts of the poem doing Michael Jacksony things. When I wrote the work I had no idea what he represented, I was simply compelled to put him in. I’ve always felt like him featuring in the poem was both (a) a shocking lapse in taste and (b) madness moonwalking through my neurons.

Here he is in Act One.

Here he he is in Act Two.

And here he is in Act Three.

Now though, I feel like I’m starting to understand his presence in a poem about change and the abyss just a little more, specifically thanks to the work of Shannon Taggart which I’ve just come across in an episode of the *best* podcast out there, Weird Studies.

Here’s the episode. It’s really good.

If you’re in London, Bethnal Green, on December 1st and would like to hear me talk about poetic experiences and the adventures poetry leads to and weird studies and perform some work and answer questions and see me get as excited as Michael-Jackson-in-a-supermarket about my next poetic Happening taking place deep within the Bank of England … then you can secure free tickets to the talk here.

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This is the first of my Correspondences project – collaborating with indy visual artists in response to one of my indy books. It’s both a continuation of my artistic practice and a way to create new publishing structures beyond traditional models.

The first correspondence is with Tiera May, a soulful occult artist and musician from northern California. I’ve loved creating this project with her. Tiera has made three artworks that pair with three of the Platonic ‘room’ poems in my recent Symbolist poetry collection Black ribbon.

When sales open on Monday there will be just eleven book and artwork bundles available. That’s three artworks and one starfish cloth covered book in the bundle. Each book will be signed and numbered as part of this gathering, each artwork is numbered and signed.

To keep postage costs as low as possible, if you’re in the Americas then you’ll be able to buy from Tiera’s website. The rest of the world can shop from me.

If you scroll to the bottom, you can hear a reading of Moon from Tiera and I.

Before that though, here are the three poems from Black ribbon and the artworks corresponding with them.

If you like all that romance then Monday is your day. Again, there are only eleven bundles of book plus three artworks available. Tiera’s tarot decks are enormously popular and sell out very quickly. I’d imagine her collectors will be quick to purchase. So, whilst Symbolism is all weary dank ennuish dreams … put aside your tombishness on the 27th and act with vigour if you’d like to secure a set.

Sound on for Moon.

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It will be a talk and a conversation and a poetry demonstration concerning language, consciousness, magick and romance. A proclamation about creating the kind poetic experiences you can see below.

The event is hosted by ArtULTRA, which is an organisation dedicated to championing emerging artists and pioneering projects that push boundaries.

ArtULTRA was founded in 2021 by Alice Black, Trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts and former director of London’s Design Museum.

Here’s the carny pitch …

Over the past seven years, in Covent Garden, in Camden, in St Brides, around the circumference of the City of London, and in a field in Devon, Thomas and his accomplices have been staging single-moment poetic Happenings. Alongside these, Thomas has been commissioned to write work for actor Sir Simon Russell Beale to perform; for the British Library to display on their walls; and for the Henry Moore Foundation to sell in their shop next to work by their sculptor founder.

The line from one of Thomas’s pieces for London Fire Brigade above Shoreditch Fire Station, ‘Love is the running towards’, is photographed daily and has featured in Lena Dunham’s recent Netflix series. Alongside all this, Thomas has been publishing and gifting (in the Blakean-tradition) thousands of limited-edition poetry books across the world.

In this talk and performance, Thomas will discuss language and consciousness, the occult influences on his work, beauty & wonder & heart, the bizarre synchronicities that happen when writing, the abyss, planting the world’s largest faery ring, and the battles for reality that we’ve forgotten we’re in.

Thomas’ next poetic experience will take place in January 2026, deep within the Bank of England. He will be revealing secret details about this event during the talk.

Thomas has been called ‘a remarkable self-driven creator, working outside the usual-suspect groups, with an enormous investment of time and talent” by Sphinx Review, “so obviously special” by Sir Tim Smit, “the strangely most punk poet” by mü magazine and “surreal, magician-like, otherworldly genius, and a brain and a spirit like no other” by various readers.

And if you see someone, say someone is doing a thing.

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