Hussain Ahmed: How I Wrote ‘Yoruba Abecedarian I’
“In most cases, the poems are hardly fully made, they come in lines, phrases and flashes.”
Category: Interviews
Thomas Jackson: How I Wrote ‘marinara as the world ends’
“I didn’t write this with an agenda, but it pulled together several fractures in my nostalgia.”
Kim Moore: How I Wrote ‘A Psalm for the Scaffolders’
“I always write in prose first, longhand in my notebook, like I’m talking to someone”
Des Mannay: How I Wrote ‘Hoxton girl in a “Last Poets” t-shirt’
“[Voices] were the first musical instruments, therefore all poetry has a music, and in some cases rhyme, repetition, and participation built into it…”
Shefali Banerji: How I Wrote ‘Fine Print’
“… I do love how language evolves within a certain context. How a word when taken from one language is reborn in another. How it switches, changes, subverts its past meaning in its new form.”
Matthew M. Cariello: How I Wrote ‘The Cowbird’
“The writing process involved the two competing impulses – invention and harmony.”
Andrea Witzke Slot : How I Wrote ‘Showering my mother on her 60th wedding anniversary’
Interview by George Sandifer-Smith There are so many ways we “speak” as humans even when we don’t utter a sound. Showering my mother on her 60th wedding anniversary She eyes me cautiously, shivering as she steps on the cold tiles. I move as I might in a forest when watching a bird, knowing the smallest shudder…
Ben Wilkinson: How I Wrote ‘What the Doorman Says’
I’m after the truth in my poems… not some misguided loyalty to ‘what actually happened’. I don’t believe any of us are reliable narrators of events, even to ourselves What the Doorman Says With a nod to C.R. That he could kill for a smoke. That the punters get older every year. That really, he…
Lily Blacksell: How I Wrote ‘Noontime Newtown’
Interview by Zoë Brigley That’s how a lot of my poems start really, a flimsy reference or a bad joke Noontime Newtown Easy girl easy the harbourmaster told me like he thought I was his horse or stoppable what are you doing running in this heat why’ve you come this way at such low tide…