The Origin & Meaning of Skendong
Skendong is a name, not a persona. It sits directly in front of the poems rather than explaining them, which is deliberate—the writing should carry its own introduction. What it points to is a body of work built out of Manchester’s streets, canals, and corner shops as much as out of any tradition of English verse, treating imperfection in the line as a working method rather than a flaw to be edited out.
The name has stuck since 2012. Everything published under it since has followed the same instinct: take whatever is actually sitting in front of you—a wine bar menu, a news story about an AI escaping its safety sandbox, or a tragic headline out of Gaza—and let the form of the poem bend to fit the subject, rather than twisting the subject to fit a pretty form.
Close to Home
The writing has stayed stubbornly close to home: the brickwork of Ancoats, New Islington, the Rochdale Canal, and the independent bars running alongside them. Manchester isn’t a passive backdrop in these verses—it is the fixed point of grit against which global digital anxieties and social transformations are actively measured.
The Manchester Framework
That approach comes from a foundation in academic discipline, even if the final lines reject academic polish. Skendong holds a Master’s Degree from the Manchester Writing School, studying under Jeffrey Wainwright, Dame Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage — both later Poet Laureate. It was Wainwright’s 2003 assessment that named narrative in verse a clunky difficulty, and that word was kept rather than corrected: it became Clunky Narratives. That background shows up not in clean symmetry, but in structural range—the decision to hold a tight villanelle structure together for a poem about wildfire, or to let a comic sonnet fall apart on purpose for an AI roast, are technical choices rather than accidents.
The Archive
This space serves as the open digital archive of that trajectory—spanning over a decade of independent poetry and prose, published entirely ad-free, and continuing to expand. Browse it by subject or by year.