Ronnie (b.1998) is a writer and researcher.
Her work has been published by Yoko Ono, ArtMonthly, The Quietus, The BBC, (The Man) REPELLER, The ISIS, The Oxford Review of Books, Porridge Magazine, LUMIN Journal, Penguin Random House, and others.
She is one of Frieze’s New Writers, the author of iPhone Notes 2021, and a recipient of The FVU & Art Monthly’s Michael O'Pray Prize.
Julian Barnes selected Ronnie's ‘Echo’ to win the University of Oxford's ISIS Writing Prize (2019). She received Repeller's NYC Writers Club Award (2020) for her text 'A Change That Looks Small But Feels Big'.
Ronnie Pope is a Doctoral (DPhil) Candidate at The University of Oxford, in the Faculty of English.
Her research explores the apprehensions, politics, and ecologies of blank space within contemporary poetry. Examining how blank space can represent the irrepresentable – that which resists linguistic expression – her thesis investigates the interplay between text and blank space as a means of communicating various ineffabilities and unknowns.
She also writes more broadly about 20th- and 21st-century literature, experimental writing practices, avant-gardes, critical theory, and the visual arts (and the overlap between these things). At Oxford, Ronnie co-convenes the English Faculty’s Modern & Contemporary Graduate Research Forum.
Ronnie is a member of the poetry collective, TheVerseVerse, whose interests encompass poetry as artwork, generative texts, AI, web3, and new models of distribution.
Throughout 2023, they have launched poetry exhibitions in New York (LUME Studios, Broadway), London (Unit, Hanover Square), and Los Angeles (Fahey/Klein Gallery, supported by the Tezos Foundation).
Most recently, in partnership with The Allen Ginsberg Estate, TheVerseVerse has developed a poetry machine – an AI language model, made up of natural language processing technology, Ginsberg’s prose, poetry, and handwritten captions from a selection of his photographs – and used it to transform Ginsberg’s archive of photographs into novel forms of expression. Just as Ginsberg proclaimed that ‘the poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world’, theVERSEverse looks to the past to illuminate the present, whilst understanding and deeply appreciating the technologies which continue to transform our world.
TheVerseVerse launched POÈME SBJKT in Paris, in partnership with L'Avant Galerie Vossen and Librairie Métamorphoses. The exhibition included works of literature both on and off the blockchain that enhance, reinvent and reimagine the relationship between text & image, analogue & digital, blurring and challenging the lines that seek to divide. It was subsequently shortlisted for The Lumen Prize for Art and Technology.
She also has a background in tech/startups, working for the cultural intelligence platform Codec.ai and the effective-altruism-inspired philanthropic initiative Founders’ Pledge.
Send her an email here.