“The form is intended to convey a geographical sense of The Netherlands and England of being on each side of the North Sea. The Doggerland section spans across the page over the two other sections to symbolise that once the two countries were part of the same land mass.”
Category: Interviews
Tim Relf: How I Wrote ‘Teeth weren’t fish’
“Handling time shifts can be difficult as they can be disorientating for readers and can present tonal challenges, but I’m interested in how people – and their priorities – change over the course of a lifetime.”
Alice White: How I Wrote ‘She Confessed What You Did’
“I think the brevity of poems—or at least mine!—is part of what makes them excellent containers for trauma. You know that however deep into a hole you have to go, you’ll be out of it soon.”
Content warning: sexual violence
Robbie Burton: How I Wrote ‘Dear Gwen in Rhiwlas’
“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.”
Robin Munby: How I Translated ‘Playa de San Llorienzu’
“I was leafing through María Teresa’s collected works, the sea only just out of sight, and when I came across this poem I decided to start translating it right away.”
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.”
Katy Giebenhain: How I Wrote ‘Iowa River, October Wind’
“The Iowa River was right there before me. Like all rivers it has a history. It was no leap to think about the way we treat performers and natural resources.”
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.”