When I take my place in front of my laptop at four in the morning (disgusting hour of the day if it’s for work, yet a sublime hour for languishing in that haze of soporific half-dreaming), I rarely arrive with a solid plan.
Category: Interviews
Briony Collins and the poems that inspire her
I was very lucky growing up, but not in the way you might imagine. My mother died when I was five and the precise circumstances of her death are still a mystery. When my father wasn’t drowning his grief, he was masking it in anger. My brother and I were emotionally stunted for a long…
Peter Knaggs on the poems that inspire him
Vasko I’ve got it in my hand now, the hefty slab of it, Vasko Popa Complete Poems and I thought I’d have a go at saying summat about it. Now, I love Popa and over the last year he has been the biggest influence over my work. At a fundamental level Popa has altered my…
Elizabeth Porter on the poems that inspire her
When I was a child there was something called ‘Chip Club’ – a leaflet given out at school once or twice a year, from which we could order books. I was lucky, my mum always bought me a book, and in 1974 I chose 100+ American Poems, edited by Paul Molloy. Why? Maybe for the…
Di Slaney on the 10 poems that inspire her
“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…
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…