Skendong Poetry:
Clunky Narratives

An experimental poetry archive from Manchester

Welcome to Skendong Poetry, an experimental poetry website and the original home of The Candid Verse. This archive explores Clunky Narratives — poems that deliberately reveal their seams, metamorphosing as they unfold. Lines refuse to settle, rhythms falter by design, and the register shifts because the subject itself refuses to remain still.

Clunky Narratives challenges the expectation that poetry must always be smooth, polished, or predictable. The writing uses friction, unusual structures, and unexpected shifts in voice — a register that can lurch from biblical prophecy to internet satire within a single stanza.

Many poetry websites favour polished, consistent forms. Skendong is not that. It is an assault on reigning rhetorical excesses — moralising, chaotic, and carving out room for genuine experimental expression.

A growing archive examining memory, identity, society, and the human condition. Ancoats corner shops and canal-side wine bars, a rogue AI escaping its sandbox, a headline from Gaza — tracing how overlooked moments and forgotten causes develop into unpredictable creative effects.

For poetry lovers, experimental writers, and readers drawn to alternative literary forms — original writing since 2012 in an ad-free space with no sponsors or products. Built around the Clunky Narratives framework, which continues to shift and evolve.

The word came from an acclaimed critic, poet, academic, and translator. In 2003 Jeffrey Wainwright wrote that narrative in verse is so often a clunky difficulty — a fault to be avoided. Skendong kept the fault and built a method.