Lychgate
When credit fails
It is curious to observe intelligent people going into debt to study creative writing. Official affirmation is costly. For a hefty sum students receive limited access to an image. They rent an idea. Higher up the scheme, those tenured are paid a fee for what they do to those who bid for recognition, but they also own nothing. One has a short lease, the other hangs around, but both are renting. They have no title.
For those in need of participation, whilst value is extracted hopes are raised—more or less—at exciting events, or in the pages of publications. Deference is required. Conformity is sacrifice. But distractions are arranged and the victim will not notice whilst futures are traded. Consciously or not, these acts acknowledge value yet to be received, a derivative contract. And the lower your leverage, the less it seems to mean.
Whilst debt expands, customers select from a range of products and services and these soak up a small part of the excess credit manufactured by central banks. In every branch of life it is the same. Fiat proliferation means more debt. As activity increases, liquidity ascends. But our books, even hand-stitched fetish objects, must balance. It has taken decades for this part of the cycle to play out.
And now it has.
A hush falls over the poetry exchange as rates rise and credit contracts. Being mostly mirage, many will not notice as it all begins to fade, but those administering budgets know. Such structures collapse gradually, at first, but eventually quick disintegration overshadows the Potemkin village. As if gods were grieving, lamenting from the apex overwhelms the last of the minions labouring below.
Relative stability is maintained, for now, and those who benefit are keen for participation to expand further. As public funding comes under question, and hobby writers become hesitant, unease increases. Think Dawn of the Dead in a bigger mall. It’s all window shopping now. The poetry scene is a zombie company.
In August 2025, BRITISH-IRISH-POETS online forum participant Jeffrey Side broke a tacit rule by asking, “Does anyone else hear (sic) wonder why this list no longer has discussions? The place is a graveyard now.”1 Side received no reply to his query.
BRITISH-IRISH-POETS forum2 is the “Discussion and news list for practitioners and readers of current poetry and poetics, with emphasis on recent postmodern and innovative poetries in Britain and Ireland.” It is a service provided by Jisc. “JiscMail helps people in education and research to discuss, debate, collaborate and communicate with their peers.” 3
Side was not a first time offender. On Friday 13th October 2023, he opened a post with this:
Does anyone here fancy writing a short piece on this list’s demise for my my blog? By “demise”, I mean that it is seldom active these days. 4
Well may he stammer. This is the poetry equivalent of holding out your bowl and asking for more. Side might have mastered the art of the innocent face, but with gimlet eye, Drew Milne identified the cause of the problem. “A small number of agent provocateurs / trolls / contrarians could easily destabilise any conversation.” Milne understands that lively discussion proceeds from prior agreement. 5
The notion that anything might be wrong with the innovative end of academic poetry cannot be minded because the language needed to think such thoughts has already been reallocated. Disagreement is not technically possible. That this is so can only be implied. Little shits like Side force the prefects to take action. But Side, it seems, cannot help but provoke. “I don’t recall the trolling you mention,” Side replied, tenaciously, back then. 6
That this contrarian was still fretting about the same subject nearly two years later indicates what he thinks is missing. Poets and poetry. He wants it to be real. Milne, a bureaucrat within and beneficiary of the system that produces redundant scene participants could not let that pass unchallenged. Those making unhelpful observations might prompt others to ask deeper questions. If you cling to a sinecure you don’t want that. A distraction was required. Milne deployed folk devils.
To reassure: not once have I sojourned, neither palely loitering nor otherwise, amongst the BRITISH-IRISH-POETS undead action role play types, so neither list nor what decomposes behind it became deathly because of me.
Apart from one or two stuck needles, the forum only comes to life when somebody actually dies. A few sad zombies stumble in from time to time, but those they seek now frown at memes elsewhere or send each other clips featuring cute things. Poet is just another clipped coin. It’s fascist to actually write the stuff.
These days system window dressing is themed around women, perhaps because you can’t hold them to the same standards as men. Regardless of that, it’s an obvious choice. A distressed scene needs something to celebrate and many women thrive on admiration. Splendidly, they back and forth between institutions, engage in activities and receive plaudits for managing all of that whilst being oppressed.
Question: why am I not still in my shroud?
I took off after a poetry bird. Call her Heurodis, our English Eurydice. As in ancient sources, and our old English version, fertility personified, she returns. In English poesy, she represents Tradition. Her fatal moment illuminates this deathly place we find ourselves in.
Ideology, proceeding from apocalyptic religion, must have its victims abnegate, willingly. Proofs of obedience are required. Those who volunteer for the undead welcome erasure. They want us in their rewritten past, permanently, or so it seems. But regardless of who controls the narrative, she shows up. Heurodis, I mean.
Orfeo pulls her out. She has hold of me. That’s how it works.
We needn’t fear a future in which poem is object of algorithm and the song of our soul is knocked out by AI, for artistic forms precede technologies used to reproduce them. Man front-runs machine. For all its data centres, the technological hallucination contains nothing vital. Its element is oblivion. Specious imitation has been in existence for decades. Innovative poets write coursework for machines.
Tradition doesn’t mean the past per se but memory, recollected or not, signed over to what remains alive. Tradition looks forward. What is called the unconscious is one’s ancestors at work within. Urging us on, they initiate. We hear them best in poetry and that is why poetry has been reformatted. We are offered a dummy in place of a tongue.
The sum of all ancestral interactions over time, and meanings they contain, form our collective memory. When something unexpected, an insight, felt as novel, appears as image or action, we are experiencing Tradition. A lady most admirable. She embodies a future in which we can live. Foresight is memory, activated. Poets mediate the signal.
So, where are the poets?
High modernism combined with elements of the postmodern contains a viable seed. Postmodernism is a luminous corpse. Late stage traditionalism, a dull cadaver. One can vent our epic dead, the other cannot.
In this age of darkness to be a poet is to be a mortician. A physician of the dead. And that is the etymology of the term. One must take from fate what goodness one finds. As per The Wasteland, I am tending corpses.
What is sometimes referred to in the UK as the ‘poetry underground’, Cambridge, etc., pipes activism into fallacies. Doing things offers distractions. People are less likely to feel futile when busy. However, appearances have worn thin since Sean Bonney’s fatal sermon. His actions drained the bloom from well appointed cheeks.7
Bonney carried the burden of the group. Attempting the impossible, he sought to embody collective contradictions and, in full view of those he served, disintegrated, slowly at first, and then he killed himself. 8 He tested cultic theory and it failed. And now the rest of them cannot work out what to do.
Owned by those who fund them, ultimately the City, its oligarchs, via this or that foundation, symposiasts have a shadow on their hands. This they must never mention. Hence vague references to archaic forms. Capitalism. Or, even more absurdly, patriarchy. As make-believe becomes too great a task for some, they decompose and slip away. Meanwhile, Bonney shines unforgiving bright through chamber window.
At risk of stating the obvious, this is no epic moment. No postmodern Homer fashions epic on anvil. More midwife than man-at-arms, I work the charnel house tending infant gods. Tradition, self regulating, absorbs what subverts it, which doesn’t last long when credit fails. After that, what rises from the dead is going to have to do some heavy lifting.
Jeffrey Side, BRITISH-IRISH-POETS forum, Saturday 9th August 2025.
The “demise” of this list, Friday 13th October 2023
It is bad enough that the facade has fallen off the Potemkin poetry village, but at least everyone else maintained a polite silence. Whether they did that to protect themselves or what was previously picturesque is not of the essence. One might linger in the forum as in a long abandoned garden folly. Some old fane, derelict, with columns. One might poke the soggy mattress with one’s toe, or peruse graffiti left by shepherds and their maids. But oh no, Side got matey with ChatGPT, which is easily led, and made it ink this on the wall:
Oh, British and Irish poets, where have you gone?
The silence on the list lingers on,
We yearn for the days of vibrant discussion,
When words were like swords, and minds in concussion.
Those receiving system credits must think Side a complete contrarian. If so, their modus operandi means they cannot say so.
“Remaining silent in the face of explicitly unpleasant posts was not possible without appearing to condone unpleasantness while entering some pitched battle on trollish territory was doomed to be a waste of time.”
The full text of Professor Milne’s reply can be found here.
“I had noticed that in recent years, moderation of the list had lapsed. But for me, the general conduct of the discussions even given that, seemed generally cordial and serious. I don’t recall the trolling you mention. Yes, there were heated debates, which might not [have] been to the taste of some people. But that is inevitable on all listservs and forums.”
Jeffrey Side, Saturday 14th October 2023
In February 2023 I took screenshots of postings relating to the death of Sean Bonney. Over the intervening two years I did not look at them. I only realised upon formatting this footnote that it was none other than Jeffrey Side who in asking a question caused the dead to murmur. I do not know him. I have had no dealings with him that I can recall. But during the writing of this article I have come to like him. He aired the crypt. Its keepers didn’t like that. Big Mother butted in:
“It shouldn’t influence our interest in Sean's work so why do people need to know? I suggest they don’t. It's a private matter. Would we want people nosing into causes of our personal situations? Rant over, Tilla”
I suggest that she is wrong.
If people do not know they cannot learn.
This link takes you to June 2020.
Scroll down to Just heard Sean Bonney died.
The thought that pointless activity, especially when so apparently wrapped up in self indulgence, decorated with objects of the ego, is underpinned by pain might seem odd, at first, but false claims hide a wasted life.
The realisation that a credit bubble, with all its misallocated resources, means just that provides an insight into our collective tragedy that is deeply painful. Those who will not or cannot face up to the extent of that tragedy and the pain associated with it must hunker down, go deeper into pointlessness, and hate those who say out loud what must otherwise be pretended away.
On the one hand, Sean Bonney was a fool. On the other, he is most admirable. What is hard to understand is that he didn't grow, learn, become a wiser kind of fool.
Ideology leads us away from knowledge? That is one possible explanation. It seems that a truly massive credit bubble, one associated with sublimity, one containing enormous inhuman force, creates conditions that make it difficult for human beings to successfully develop within.
We don't seem able to mature as men and women once did. It matters not what politics one employs, as justification, counterbalance, distraction, or the technology one is surrounded by, we don't seem able to grow up, or far fewer of us do. Perhaps that has something to do with the scale of the unreality. It can seem that there is nothing an individual can meaningfully do.
The only way through is for individuals to take responsibility for themselves. For those who reject that in favour of an ideology, they will abuse those who do accept it until they are forced by circumstance to change their view. If it is by then too late, as for many it will be, they will perish. For now, they do what they do.