“Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was a missing ingredient when I was trying and failing to write poetry as a young man.“ The Hustler We know we can’t finesse what’s been Michael Donaghy I met him twice. Once in my local, where suited he sat with a half of Guinness, his cue in its case like an…
Category: Interviews
Jack Solloway: How I wrote ‘Dating’ and ‘Shave and Haircut’
“[T]he poems, while ostensibly about other things, are just one-sided conversations in search of someone else. Most poems are, at least to begin with […]” I. Dating There are severed heads in the British MuseumThe human kind if you’d like to see themI can book a ticketIf you fancy it O, it says hereThey’re not…
Jessica Mookherjee: How I wrote ‘Jail Birds’
“I started to think of all the ways we are locked in our own selves and how much we can ever really be understood by others.“ Jail Birds The crow keeps records of my movements,no need for locks, his beak is keen and fast. Everywhere the starlings gather, they chitchateverything, quick quick, I go back…
Poetry Wales welcomes Marvin Thompson and Zoë Brigley as the magazine’s first joint editors!
“I am overjoyed to be appointed as the new editor of Poetry Wales with Zoë Brigley.”
Rosalind Hudis: How I write a poem
“Alchemy, metamorphosis, seems to be at the heart – a moment when the language of the poem leaps beyond all the mechanics of effort I put in.”
Kathy Miles: How I write a poem
“If you’re a poet, I don’t think there’s ever a time when you’re not writing.” In his poem ‘Night Fishing’,  Glyn Edwards likens the writing process to wrestling with a pike thrashing in his throat in the middle of the night, which he’d haul ‘from my head in waking gloom / and wrap its snarl…
Susie Wild: How I write a poem
I RUN baths like I write poems.Draw the hot water first,soak the blank white. Leave it sit for a while often too long’til it soups cold. Or I’ll run it steaming full,let out the excess to avoid floods,that unwanted heat bit by bit, top up with the C tap. Submerge ’til skin turns pink, sweat forms on my brow,…
Gareth Writer-Davies: How I write a poem
“I wasn’t prepared for all the time that writing involves […] and the obsession that has risen within me. But I think it was what I was made to do.” I’m often identified as a Welsh poet (something which I’m always slow to contradict) but as usual, the truth is more complicated than that. With…
Rob Miles: How I write a poem
There is no muse, but there is fertile mush. Everyone bar no one is at least a first stage poet, that is, someone who ‘hears’ things: other’s words; or their own, internally;