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POEMS VS THE CURSE OF TRUMPERY: Four poems by Graham Lock
Liar! Liar!with sincere apologies to William Blake Liar! Liar! orange bright,beacon for the ultra right.What immodest boast or liecould TRUMP your own mendacity? On what distant golf-course greendid you learn to strut & preen?Whence the bragging? Whence the bile?Whence that vain & faux hairstyle? And what migrant plea or groan,could hope to crack your heart…
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CHRISTOPH VON DOHNÁNYI (1929 – 2025): Obituary by Neil Fulwood
Christoph von Dohnányi died on 6 September 2025, two days shy of his 96th birthday. To say he’d led a full life would be an understatement. It’d be no exaggeration, in fact, to say that his life was the stuff of an epic novel or a sweeping Hollywood production with a hefty budget. All the…
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Kathleen Bell – Three Poems
LEAVINGS I Left behind Some left. Just being scaredwasn’t enough. Cash helpedand social statusmight give a useful contact.Luck mattered most. As for the left behind,we struggled. The unlucky always do.Some were unwise. You call them martyrs.Most kept their heads down, had to endureblockade and damaged harvest.And those in charge –you know how rulers are. At…
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Fawzia Muradali Kane – Guaracara (Carcanet): Book Review by Wayne Burrows
The writer and architect Fawzia Muradali Kane’s third book, and her second full length collection, Guaracara, emerges almost fifteen years after her debut, Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press, 2011), and more than a decade on from the appearance of her chapbook publication Houses Of The Dead (Thamesis, 2014). The long gaps were explained by Kane herself…
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COMICAL LITTLE GEEZERS: The ups and downs of PERFORMANCE
Here are some of the things Performance fetishises: Performance is about a lot of things, principally the merging and blurring of identities. With a specific focus on sexual identities (today’s word on Sesame Street is “troilism”). It’s about machismo and fragility; brutality and camp. It’s about the underground and the underworld. It’s about cufflinks and cross-dressing. It’s about class and…
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Please Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Time, imagination, grief and the quest for meaning in Don’t Look Now
The central nervous system conventionalises reality for us so that we can move through time and space … We’ve inherited large parts of our view of the world from our forebears hundreds of thousands of years ago … A sense of time gave Homo sapiens a way of storing, from minute to minute, information about…
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LANDSCAPE AND MINDSCAPE: The fragmented spaces of Donald Cammell’s ‘White of the Eye’
Following their collaboration on Performance – arguably the most influential counter-culture film to come out of the UK in the ‘70s – Nic Roeg went on to make 16 feature films, various shorts, and worked in television; Donald Cammell made just three more movies, a couple of shorts and some videos for U2. Of these three films, Demon…
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CARRY ON SARGENT
Edwardian Dandy, savvy Savoyard and Imperial Father of the Proms, Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895 -1967) has, like many great musicians of the past, been all too easily typecast. Even before his death, Sargent aka ‘Flash Harry’ was seen by many as a kind of musical Lord Fauntleroy: the John Mills of conductors replete with slicked-back…
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Cathy Grindrod: Three Poems
The best days of your life The girl in the nettles, rolled overand over, for talking posh the sensational bruise a hockey stickmakes on a mottled leg the shape of my undiagnosed broken armgrinding through double maths acid eating through Mr Reed’s fingerhis dance round the lab dead frogs splayed on dissecting boardsfine silver tools…
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INSECTS, TINFOIL AND ASHLEY JUDD: The crazed brilliance of William Friedkin’s BUG
When you think of William Friedkin, you think of big set pieces crammed with detail. The exorcism and the myriad ways in which a demonic force kicks back in The Exorcist. The car/L-train chase in The French Connection. The car chase that pretty much traverses an entire city in To Live and Die in L.A. Dynamiting the fallen…
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DANGEROUS PAYLOAD: FRIEDKIN’S SORCERER AND THE LONG SHADOW OF THE WAGES OF FEAR – Neil Fulwood
Sorcerer was meant to be a modest, low-cost production; a filler between The Exorcist and a big-budget project called The Devil’s Triangle which was intended to capitalise on the former’s box office supremacy. The very idea of a remake of H.G. Clouzot’s nihilistic masterpiece being realised effectively on a moderate budget should have rung alarm bells from the start, and…
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How to be a poet: META AI advice
Shaun Belcher asks Zuckerberg’s robots how to be a poet….the answers are surprising Here the transcript of whole interaction. Ever felt down in the dumps? That the world not recognising your talents..that fame will always elude you? Fear not Mark Z and crew have the perfect solutionJUST ASK META!You will be surprised what comes back…….
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Graham Lock: Three Poems on Gaza
Shylock and Portia Address Benjamin Netanyahu Shylock: Hath not a Gazan eyes? Hath not a Gazan hands, organs, senses, passions? Are they not subject to typhoid, hunger and despair? If you bomb them, do they not bleed? When you speak of “safe zones” and “targeted strikes”, do they not laugh? If you starve them, do…
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Ruth Hobson: Three Poems
The King is Dead In 1536, a woman imagining the death of a kingwas to be drawn on a hurdle to the pyreand burned alive. Well, I don’t want him to die, Your Honour,I am just a Republican. But imagine, I can’t help … Imagine the death of a king, no more Kings,imagine the death…
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The City as Anti-Hero: Freidkin’s To Live and Died in L.A. – Neil Fulwood
7th August 2025 marks the second anniversary of the death of maverick filmmaker William Friedkin. CHAINLINK publishes a series of articles on his work throughout the month. By the mid-Eighties, William Friedkin’s star was in the descendant. The one-two punch of The French Connection and The Exorcist was a decade behind him. Sorcerer, his cripplingly over-budget remake of H.G. Clouzot’s The…
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Benjamin Zephaniah, Sitting Bull and a Sleepy Nation – Andy Croft
Effective oppositional spaces are rapidly disappearing. Democratic process is blocked by inequality, authoritarianism, deceit and a narrow ideological consensus. Constitutional and legal constraints on power, within and between nation states have no answer to violence, dishonesty and lawlessness. The Fourth Estate is browbeaten and cowed. Traditional forms of political participation (joining political parties, leaving political…
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Mu Cao: Poems translated by Hongwei Bao
Translator’s note:All the poems are translated from Chinese into English with Mu Cao’s permission. I have chosen to use small case to translate all of Mu Cao’s poems because Chinese characters do not make distinctions between big and small cases, and the nondescript small case would be truer to the spirit of Mu Cao’s poems….
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Mu Cao: Dark Chronicler of China’s Working-Class Queer Life – Hongwei Bao
For more than two decades, working-class queer Chinese Mu Cao 墓草 (b.1974, Henan, China) has been a unique voice in Chinese literature and global queer literature. Often referred to as a ‘folk poet’ and ‘a voice from the bottom of Chinese society’, his poems celebrate queer desire and migrant worker experience. A high school drop-out,…
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Fiona Robertson – Three Poems
Bittersweet I bathe in the bittersweetnessof ill sonsand bereaved friendsand strangers connectingand and and old friends back on trackand death in lifeand birth after deathand the limitations of languageand the beauty of wordsand pain with depthand the realness of me and all this turning upside downand creation from destructionand who’d have thought itand I wouldn’t…
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Gregory Woods – Three Poems
HOLDING STILL You imagine me standing at the windowwatching the fireworks above the harbourYou imagine me choking back the tears and the cocaineheartrate uncommonly highspirits expectedly lowYou imagine me burning your lettersand cursing the day that we metprecise about the date the time of daythe occasion in the lecture hallthe summer in Sardinia I’ve been…