“It was during the process of writing that the amount of extra work my cousin and I caused my aunt struck me. Until then the poem had been little more than a list of her daily tasks, then a need to say sorry led to the prayer idea.”
Author: Zoë Brigely
Editor of Poetry Wales
Zoë Brigley is an award-winning poet, editor and academic. As well as editing Poetry Wales, she shares the role of Poetry Editor for Seren Books with Rhian Edwards, and is an Assistant Professor in English at Ohio State University.
Jenny Danes: How I Wrote ‘In Emergency Break Egg’
“I think it took me many years of writing for humour to have earned its place, and for me to acknowledge it as part of my poetic voice.”
Edward Heathman: How I Wrote ‘Night Watch’
“To me, place is about the relationship of distance-to-closeness. How connected someone feels to their national identity can be just as important as how direct or indirect a speaker is in a poem, or how straightforward or mysterious an image is.”
Julia Forster: How I Wrote ‘Drawing, 1988’
“Perhaps that’s what this poem is about: the many-dimensional reality in which we live as adults as opposed to the constraints of a childhood in which we are operating on different brain wave lengths.”
A.M. Juster: How I Translate a Poem
“I am a traditionalist and work hard to keep the meaning very close to the original while also echoing the sounds and rhythms of the original.”
B. Anne Adriaens: How I Wrote ‘The sea giveth and the sea taketh away’
“Writing long-hand in a notebook feels like a safe space, if only because I’m usually the only person who can read my messy handwriting!”
Content warning: mentions of drowning, death of a child
Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé: How I Wrote ‘The Dreams of Grandfather and Me’
“The answer I got was the dream. That dream, a cherished ambition, becomes a kind of symbiosis connection between my grandfather and me.”
‘The Epic of Cader Idris’ by Samatar Elmi
Poetry Wales are delighted to share here a video featuring poet Samatar Elmi who performs the title poem of the upcoming poetry collection The Epic of Cader Idris (Bloomsbury/flipped eye, 2024)
David Lloyd: How I Wrote ‘Devil on Wheels’
“I hope that along with evoking an artist’s sensibility and intellect at a young age, my poem also conveys [Richard] Burton’s powerful forward motion in life”