“The beginning of a poem matters to me very much. I want to pull the reader right into the thicket. My favourite poems are those that snag me from the first line and make it impossible to pull myself free.”
“I think that when we have children, many of us tend to turn the natural world into fairyland for a while, and share their entrancement with it.”
“Given [the constraint of short form], I like to utilise materials that, in conjunction with the short text, offer additional meaning to ultimately make the poems multi-layered, esoteric and more nuanced”
“I didn’t want to be a poet who knocks out book after book of ‘auto-pilot’ poems, so I stopped writing the thirty-line poem and sought something that would challenge me. I waited to be astonished by something different.”
A look back at some of the best writing tips from our How I Write a Poem interviews in 2023. Share your favourites with us!
“[I]nstead of having two separate language versions of the poem, I ended up with one, which brings the languages together… This, I think, reflects how the brain of a bilingual/multilingual person works”
“I love how agile and stripped back it is as a form. It doesn’t allow you to dwell, chewing away unnecessary information and only leaving the reader with the heart of the idea”
Content warning: mentions/implications of domestic or intimate partner abuse
“The poem is an attempt to look back as well as forward, to acknowledge the creativity of women past, present and future”
“It is in the editing-amending-polishing phases of the original thought-story-memory that I listen to the rhythms of the language, to the unfolding of the scenes, if more than one, and sense when there is what I think of as a key change, almost as though it is music”
