Nols Nathankski went to make poems with the Longplayer a 1000 year song at The Trinity Bouy Wharf Experimental lighthouse to celebrate a year off the booze. He wrote to 36 prompts below.

Trinity Buoy Wharf is home to the iconic Experimental Lighthouse- London’s only remaining example- built in 1864. The Lighthouse was never used to aid navigation on the Thames, but to experiment.

Nols has played the Longplayer at all of the PENANCE poetry workshops where over 200 poems have been made to the sound of the singing bowls.

Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer of the KLF.

Listen to the Long Player and make poems to some prompts!

Longplayer

1. Describe the lighthouse as if it were a friend you meant to text back weeks ago

3. Write a list-poem of strange items found in the lighthouse lost-and-found, each item revealing something about the person who left it.

4. Let the 1,000-year song narrate a single moment from your life—one it refuses to forget.

5. Compose a love letter to London from the top of the lighthouse, but your pen keeps drifting into mystic metaphors

6. Write a poem where every stanza is a different decade of the lighthouse’s future, as the song continues playing.

7. Describe the lighthouse as if it were gossiping about the city below.

8. Imagine the lighthouse is the last remaining building above water after a flood write the poem as a survivor’s diary entry.

9. Write a poem that begins with a mundane task (making tea, sweeping, checking your phone) but ends in a spiritual awakening triggered by the long player .

10. Write a dialogue between you and the lighthouse itself; the lighthouse knows too much.

11. Write a poem about leaving a party early to climb the lighthouse stairs alone

12. write a poem as the lighthouse lens as if it were an oracle reflecting possible futures.

13. Write a poem that takes place entirely during the ten seconds it takes the beacon to make one revolution.

14. Use the long player as a metaphor for something in your life that won’t end, can’t end, shouldn’t end.

15. Describe a moment when you wanted to disappear

16. Write a poem from the perspective of the final visitor the lighthouse will ever receive.

17. Rewrite a childhood memory as if it happened inside the lighthouse

18. write the chorus of the long player

19. Write a poem where you try to map all of London using only the emotions you feel inside the lighthouse.

20. Invent a superstition that strangers whisper about this lighthouse—then break it.

21. Describe the long player - without referencing music: use taste, smell, texture, weather.

22. Write a poem as a secret you tell only to the lighthouse staircase while climbing.

23. Describe a mundane London street scene but filter it through a sudden mystical vision sparked by the lighthouse’s light.

24. Write an elegy for everyone the lighthouse didnt save.

25.Write a poem that begins with the line: “I didn’t come here to be redeemed, but…”

26.Let the fog surrounding the lighthouse be a character with opinions.

27.Write a poem where the lighthouse becomes a stand-in for your own body its cracks, its shining, its stubbornness.

28.Describe the longplayer as if it were composed from fragments of every poem you have ever written in london.

29.Write a poem where frank O’Hara, diane Seuss, and herman Hesse all appear in the lighthouse at 3 a.m. and give you conflicting advice.

30.write a poem that imagines what happens after the song finally stops—one thousand years from now—and who is there to hear the silenc

31.write a poem as a singing bowl

32.write a sonnet to the longplayer

33.write a prayer to the human race

34.you have to get out of the lighthouse when it is locked using only a poem

35. write a poem as an ending vibration

36. ⁠Write a prayer to save yourself