Irish University Review 55.2 (Autumn/Winter 2025)

The Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of Irish University Review (Vol 55 No. 2) published in January 2026 carries two distinct contributions from me:

The first is an interview I gave to Lucy Collins, Associate Professor of Modern Poetry at University College Dublin and editor of Irish University Review, reflecting on my curatorial project 'Is this a poem?' at Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI). It bookends the exhibition nicely since a public conversation with Lucy was a core element of its launch on 21 February 2024.

This interview revisits some of the themes of that initial, undocumented conversation. It is based on the transcript of a new post-project conversation we recorded at MoLI for the museum's digital channel, RadioMoLI, in June 2025.

From the introduction:

This conversation between Lucy Collins and Christodoulos Makris began as a podcast for Radio MoLI, discussing Is This a Poem? Adventures on the Edge of an Art Form, an ambitious and innovative exhibition, curated by Makris, which was hosted at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) from February to September 2024. This mixed media exhibition presents work that exists beyond the page in the form of film performance, sound installation, and digital object, among others. This conversation explores the many facets of the exhibition and its contribution to current conversations around poetry in Ireland.

At the bottom of this post you will find facsimiles of the first and last page of the 11-page interview. In due course I intend to make the text available in full on the dedicated 'Is this a poem?' archive page on this website, subject to permission.

My second contribution is a new poem - or more precisely a two-page excerpt from a new long poem with title 'A Challenge.' In addition to text, this piece incorporates a deliberate visual glitch. It considers the pair of chess matches played by Garry Kasparov against IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer in 1996 and 1997 in the context of the recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, its impact on human creativity and endeavour and its implications on identity and voice.

The poem is placed directly following the interview in this issue of Irish University Review as a device proposing movement from 'Is this a Poem?' into new work.

Many thanks to Lucy Collins for her enduring support and interest in my work.

Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, is published twice a year by Edinburgh University Press on behalf of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL). Founded in 1970, it is the leading journal in Irish literary criticism, covering, on a global scale, all aspects of Irish literature in the English language. It is available through subscription.