“I have always felt that risk could energise a poem and that the reader might feel the heat being generated”
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.
Saddiq Dzukogi: How I Wrote ‘The Old Ones’
“[This] poem represents the beginning of a willingness to engage in this new awe of the self through the prism of ancestry. It is an act of seeking permission to pursue this new wonder.”
Hannah Linden: How I Wrote ‘Each Morning, New Leaves’
“My poet mind is far wiser than I am. It takes me awhile to catch up with it.”
Jeff William Acosta: How I Wrote ‘of thee I sing’
“They came in like flashes, in fragments—a tapestry of thoughts. Writing poetry in a language that is not native to me, in a sense makes me think of ways or approach the English language in a different angle.”
Paul Deaton: How I Wrote ‘Harvest’
“I find that some poems I write, luckily, just seem to happen – I might get a first line, like a fish biting, and then, if I have time, I let the poem unfold itself, and see where that line takes me”
Suman Gujral: How I Wrote ‘Lion’ | Video Interview
“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.”
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.”
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.”