“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupry I’ve been asked to answer an excellent question about poems, books or poets who have influenced me, and…
Category: Interviews
Ben Bransfield on the poems that inspire him
Another guardian of the soul for me is Mary Oliver, who I always turn to when I need a quiet jolt back into my ‘one wild and precious life’
Katrina Naomi on the poems that inspire her
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.
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.”