Latest NEWS August 2026

10,000 plus views! It was amazing to come back from our summer break in Finland to discover that SoundOfManyWaters has now received so much attention. In June 2025 I was excited to report that SOMW had received 3,000 views. By May 2026 that had grown to 8,000. Now we are in five figure territory! Thank you for taking the time and trouble to visit this blog and check out these poems. I hope that you have found them enjoyable, meaningful and inspiring.

However I have suspicions about some of the views. The stats are starting to show strange spikes. All of a sudden, on a single day, there are a couple of hundred views in a country where there has been little or no interest. Why should several hundred people in Vietnam or Singapore or Germany or the US suddenly all decide on the same day to check out my work?

I surmise that these views do not come from humans but from bots. My guess is that tech corporations are hunting down text to feed into their large language models so that when a bored keyboard jockey asks AI to write them a poem, some reasonably authentic-looking text may emerge. In one aspect it’s flattering to think that my musings may have some tiny effect on this tide of verbiage sloshing around the world…

But frankly that cozy thought is totally outweighed by the outrageous cheek that is stealing my personal inspirations, chewing them up and regurgitating them without so much as an acknowledgement. I suppose I could even find myself facing challenges over copyright or plagiarism because AI has published material using my own turns of phrase and ideas before I could do so, other than on this blog, myself. It stinks.

It won’t bother the tech bros much, but I can only respond to all this by asserting my copyright over all the material on this blog. If you would like to use it in some productive way, that’s great – but please let me know so I know you are not one of Zuckerberg’s bots.

In other news, my mate Jon has fixed me up with a gig at the Dulverton Literary Festival Fringe. The Festival takes place on the weekend of 21-22 November. I am unable to confirm the exact time and place for now, please check later – I’ll put out more details nearer the time. If you’re in the Dulverton area it would be great to see you!

It's been a productive summer with quite a few new pieces appearing on the blog - see especially the post New for Summer 2026. There are others in the pipeline which are still being worked on and which which will hopefully emerge in the near future. Keep an eye out for updates and happy reading!

Colin.