N.N. Benn

N.N. Benn says, "The idea for N.N. Benn came in 2016 in the form: I should write a very long poem about Brexit called ‘Toblerone’. Numerous false starts were made over the years, but it wasn’t until 2024 that the poem asserted itself. Coming out of the trauma of Covid and lockdown in 2022, I was diagnosed with a terminal, life limiting illness. Then, on my birthday in 2023, I was unexpectedly given the all clear. Turned out it was a mistake all along: a misread x-ray. I continued to suffer from health problems: a shingles flare up; prolonged burn out; sudden onset migraines. I spent time in therapy. I found out I am autistic. I had an identity crisis. Keeping a diary was one thing that helped me recover. As an autistic person, process and routine are very important to my sense of self. Goals and deadlines stressed me out, however, I realised that I needed a creative pursuit that was continuous, unending, and above all else, fun. So in 2024 I started work on the poem that I call ‘the love epochal’. N.N. Benn is a fictionalised version of myself. He writes a line of poetry each day - just added on to the end of an eternal work in progress. The subject matter is whatever I happened to be thinking about that day, when I opened the file and wrote the line: little snippets of echolalia; deep thoughts about time and space; 'ouch, I stubbed my toe; 'oh look, there’s a heron.' I then edited the poem and posted it to my blog one year later. For the first six months I also set the month’s poetry to music and assembled a video to go along with it which I posted to Youtube and Instagram, but it proved impossibly time consuming. I would like to do more work in video in the future though. At the moment, I am posting little poetic extracts and blogs, three times a week, to my Wordpress site. I have a few spoken word songs available on Apple Music and Spotify under ‘the love epochal’, some videos on Youtube, and I perform a couple of times a month at Poet’s Corner at Hillhead Bookclub. I also write prose and enjoy endurance sport."