Whenever I read a new collection, I always copy out poems that I love – I suppose it’s a way of keeping those poems close to me but also, in a more nerdy way, seeing how they’ve worked line breaks for example, and finding out how the poems feel as I type them out. I love learning like this.
Category: Interviews
Lauren Pope on the poems that inspire her
For me, the persona poem was the gateway drug into writing a more mature form of poetry. It offered a distancing mechanism – the ability to project the personal onto the classical. Poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were hugely influential. And then there’s Louise Glück. Her sequence-length lyric, Meadowlands, which depicts her failed…
Jan Harris on the poems that inspire her
Growing up in the countryside, I suppose it was natural for me to be drawn to nature poetry. The first poetry book I owned was Ted Hughes’ Selected Poems. I still have most of it; the back cover is missing and many of the pages have been punctured or torn by canine teeth – of the…
Mari Ellis Dunning on the poems that inspire her
“There is a real magic(k) in finding a beautiful line or unique turn of phrase that jolts you as a reader, and sits in your gut far beyond that initial reading”
Leo Temple on the poems that inspire him
“‘A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream,’ by Wallace Stevens, has, for some time, been the poem I return to when I have truly lost my way.”
Chloe Garner on how she writes a poem
“I hurry the final stretch to get the poem on paper. Repeating it over and over, scared I will forget.”
Matthew Francis on how he writes a poem
“I had a sudden fantasy that the man and the bookshop only existed on Tuesday afternoons, that place and time had merged into one, and everyone else I passed on that brief walk to the leisure centre seemed to me part of that imaginary Tuesday world.”
Maria Jastrzebska on the poems that inspire her
“As you see, back then it was such a man’s world. Thank heavens for finding Sylvia Plath, whom I read over and over. Things only got more complicated when I began coming out.”
‘Music and Light’: an interview with Paul Henry (extended version) Poetry Wales 55.2 Winter 19/20
Read Jonathan Edwards’ exclusive interview with Paul Henry.