Ellen Dillon

@drnollid

bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus

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Ellen Dillon@drnollid· 12d

Thank you everyone who made it to Waterstones on Tuesday. Most especially Liz and Leeanne, my fellow poet-evangelists ;)

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· 29d

Sunrise, Rainbow Beach

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 13

A young dingo on 75 mile beach, K'gari

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 8

I'm pure obsessed with her! This is one of 2 books I brought to Sydney, as it contains the intro (and only sliver I can lay my hands on) of the novel she wrote about living in Sydney and working in the Colgate factory in the 1940s

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 6

Queen Victoria Building, Sydney

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 5

First batch of Australian books secured. Looking for recommendations for Sydney book shops with great poetry sections 💙

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jun 23

Delighted to be launching my new book from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social in Cork, along with @leeannequinn.bsky.social's phenomenal Landscape with Question. Waterstone's, July 28th, 6.30 💙

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jun 15

ER This is Dr Romano looking up at the helicopter that's about to fall from the sky and kill him. The same one that severed his arm the previous season? Who can say

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Dec 29

RIP Rilke, who died on this day 99 years ago aged 51. His "Sonnets to Orpheus" shaped my pretentious teen-hood and my first book "Sonnets to Malkmus." In my next book, out in Spring with @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social, the fish in this photo quotes a line from "Go to the Limits of your Longing."

A tilled turret on a pink sandstone tower, topped with a tin weather-vane in the shape of a fish. The fish glints in sunlight against a clear blue sky.

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Dec 12

"What would happen if Russians landed at Shannon and took over the airport?"

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Dec 7

The Christmas whale is perched in our teeny tiny tree and the cat hasn't seen him yet

Blue felt whale with a white quiff hanging in a christmas tree with lights and red tinsel

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Dec 2

Lou Barlow and Lou Barlow's extra pair of socks at @dolanslimerick.bsky.social last night. He played all my favourites and I cried. What a legend.

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Dec 1

This year as writer in residence at UCC has been an absolute joy, and before I head off into the sunset I'm reading at this fundraiser for Gaza go Bragh at UCC Library, organised by the mighty Nell Korben on December 10th. Tickets at link in comments. Bígi linn, saoirse don phalaistín 🇵🇸

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Sep 5

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Sep 2

Delighted to be reading at Ó bhéal go béal in Cork next Monday. Poems from the new and newest books, featuring some Seán Ó'Ríordáin and some birds

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Aug 19

It's syllabus time, and I'm reading Three Poems for the first time in too many years. Thank you John Ashbery

At this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of listening, as
though to the feeling of the wind before it starts, and it slides down this
anticipation of itself, already full-fledged, a lightning existence that has
come into our own. The trees and the streets are there merely to divide it up,
to prevent it from getting all over itself, from retreating into itself instead of
logically unshuffling into this morning that had to be, of the day of
temptation. It is with some
playfulness that we actually sit down to the business of mastering the many
pauses and the abrupt, sharp accretions of regular being in the clotted
sphere of today's activities. As though this were just any old day. There is
no need for setting out, to advertise one's destination. All the facts are here
and it remains only to use them in the right combinations, but that building
will be the size of today, the rooms habitable and leading into one another
in a lasting sequence, eternal and of the greatest timeliness.

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Aug 2

Found these four Ellens hiding in my copy of Simone Weil's factory diaries, pointing me to machinery-operating tips and the importance of not letting imaginary difficulties slow you down

Side view of a copy of Simone Weil's factory diaries in which the pages are being held open by a strip of passport photos of me wearing a green jacket and grey keffiyeh, from which two photos have been cut out

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 29

Christ, wouldn't you just walk into the sea?

Job ad:
Social media online marketing officer Dublin City Council

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 26

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Theory of Water

A book, a letter, a document, a paper. When the colonizers came, they were always lost because they refused to live in the network of the living. The colonizers needed a book, a letter, a document, a compass, a paper, a policy, a law, an accounting, so that they could build fences and put up signs that said No Trespassing and Private Property.

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 13

For those homesick for the golden age of poetry reviews (i.e. mantrums over work YOU don't understand, couched in the coercive 'we' of school debate club) feast your eyes on this review of Amelia Rosselli's 'Variazioni Belliche' from 1965

Amelia Rosselli. Variazioni belliche. Mi-
lano. Garzanti. 1964. 187 pages. 1,800 1.

The first impression we receive from these
poems is that they are not poems yet, but
rather notes for possible poems, piled together
at random and printed in the same form as
they were first jotted down. Later we begin
to think that they may represent a voluntary
decomposition of rhythms, an exaggeration of
some of the experiments made fifty years ago

by Dino Campana. However, still later we
notice in them a different kind of exaggera-
tion, related to the cold philological curiosity
of Pier Paolo Pasolini's prose: words drawn
from all levels of Italian, both literate and
illiterate, and from many different languages,
not organized in a comprehensible pattern but
rather set side by side in a sort of mad dance.
The fact is that we are confronted with a
sexual frenzy, which remains such because
the author has not made any effort to give it
an orderly appearance. It is a chaos of words
which reflects an emotional chaos; and the
author does not seem to be capable of the
necessary detachment to master it. To prove
it, we could quote from almost every page.
And if poetry means precisely to bring ex-
pressive order into chaos, we find it difficult to
classify this volume as poetry.

Had Amelia Rosselli's book been written
during the age of Futurism, it could have been
understood as an extreme experiment by one
who sooner or later would have found a
personal voice. But today we cannot justify
that such a kind of experimentation has be-
come part of the pre-history of contemporary
poetry. The irony of all this is that Amelia
Rosselli seems to have a poetic gift, however
tenuous her vein may be. A few of her very
brief compositions prove it. They are still
somewhat raw and appear unfinished, but
they do have an expressive suggestiveness of their own. Here is one of them: "L'alba a
rintocchi cade / sulla mia testa ammalata /
il difficile umore m'assale / verde come la
paura." If she could be honest with herself and
work with compositions of this sort, she would
probably write something not only pleasant
but of some artistic validity.

Giovanni Cecchetti
Tulane univers

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 12

"The issue in question ran to some prose masquerading as poems"

Brian Cox in Succession. Long-suffering face. Caption: I love you, but you are not serious people.

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 11

Good! The commentariat think we're tired of Presidents with hearts and principles, showing once again that their fingers are on the pulse of a dead Ireland

Photo of Michael D Higgins in front of his portrait. Text beneath reads

Diarmaid Ferriter: Has the public had enough of presidents like Michael D Higgins?

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 10

Fanny Howe, SoundEye 2014. My first one. She read a poem about the train from Limerick Junction that I read every time I get the train from Limerick Junction through 'mountains floating in water' Love to everyone whose heart is cracked a little wider today 💔 griffinpoetryprize.com/poem/the-mon...

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 9

Let's spend that interregnum fighting monsters! Humans in the way--with free time and guillotines

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 9

How have we ended up in a world where robots doing our jobs is a bad thing instead of the realisation of a utopian dream? Oh yeah, because anyone not contributing to the enrichment of the obscene billionaire gowl class has been deemed disposable. Good job (that could have been done by robots)

Headline reading 'Futurist Adam Dorr on how robots will take our jobs: ‘We don’t have long to get ready – it’s going to be tumultuous' with image of robot playing chess

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 7

Oh This 🥹 Got to spend time with Maggie O'Sullivan in Cork this weekend at SoundEye. Can't tell ye how much I love and admire this woman ❤️

Two women (Maggie O'Sullivan and me) smiling with their arms around each others' shoulders. Maggie is wearing a floral shirt and light raincoat, I'm in a red Karl Marx t-shirt. Other poets can be glimpsed in the background--Mira Mattar, Aodán McCardle, Catherine Walsh.

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 4

SoundEye kicking of in shtyle in the shtepps at 12 soundeye.wordpress.com

Room like the one in the opening scene of Tár but with light pouring in from high windows

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 3

Tower Room 2

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jul 1

It's all happening in Cork this week! Details of SoundEye schedule and venues up on the blog now soundeye.wordpress.com

Ellen Dillon@drnollid· Jun 28

An infuriating read, this. Minister off on a solo-run, and nobody in the Department called to account for failing to act on 60(!!!) emails flagging the problem