“One piece of advice is… to not worry about whether anyone’s going to see the work; to make, to immerse yourself in your work and enjoy it. And don’t make it for anything in particular, but just make it for the sake of making, because [the] kind of creativity where you don’t kind of shoebox yourself into thinking we have to be one thing or another, that’s very liberating.”
Author: Frances Turpin
Frances is Poetry Wales' Magazine Manager
Aaron Kent: How I Wrote ‘Between all of us like a Wavy Halo Form’
“After the brain haemorrhage I was put on very heavy sleeping tablets, and when they kicked in I began to write poetry, then I’d wake and find streams of subconscious thoughts, odd typos, and nonsense words which I’d later edit into a poem while conscious.”
Adam Cairns: How I Wrote ‘Mum Dancing’
“The sonnet seems like a safe room to me. It has known dimensions, the four walls of its rhymes and the turn.”
After Dickinson and Disability | Watch the Panel
From the 2022 Tell It Slant Festival
Camille Francois: How I Wrote ‘Let us go down, and there confound’
“I like to think of poems as machines crafted to destroy what we know, in order to access forms of wisdom or something archaic about our nature which we might not otherwise have consciously encountered.”
Mat Riches: How I Wrote ‘Tomato Plants’
“I’d love to say that was a deliberate choice, that it was a way of showing the protagonist is boxed in like the tomatoes, or like the holes you cut into a tomato growbag, but I’d be lying.”
Megan J Arlett: How I Wrote ‘Fresh Meat’
“My poems often float around in fragmented and incomplete drafts until that first, encapsulating line arrives on the page”
Bethany Handley: How I Wrote ‘Cling Film’
“Poetry provides the space for readers to bear witness to ableism. This calling out of ableism in poetry can be unsettling for audiences if they recognise their own attitudes or behavior.”
Rakyah Assam: How I Wrote ‘The Scientist’
“I think the way that foreignness affects your relationship with the place that you’re in has a lot of parallels to the way that we operate in dreams in this way.”