“However tenuous the relationship between the inspiration and the final poem, that ‘moment’ in which something happened to make you pick up your pen remains your only connection with the obsessive process of writing that followed.” What lies behind a poem is mysterious. A poem’s ‘inspiration’ is often unexpected and sometimes barely reflected in the…
Category: Interviews
Maria Jastrzȩbska on how she writes a poem
“The best way to write a poem is underwater. The sounds of the world, of other people are muffled. Only their underbellies and limbs ripple through the water.” Geometric lines repeat themselves along the bottom of the pool or if you’re lucky enough to be in a clear sea shy fish suddenly appear from behind…
Hanan Issa on how she writes a poem
“Poetry is the ultimate language ‘glow up’ and it is where I go to try and make sense of the storm” Dragon-taming? I started writing about dragons. Not the friendly creatures that let you ride on their backs. I wrote them as wild monsters with blood-stained teeth and fiery tempers. They definitely ate…
Andrew Spragg on how he writes a poem
“If you are not reading likely you are not writing.” Be wary of others’ methods or manifestos. Any sort of declaration. Two degrees, ten books and less sure than ever. It happens rarely every day. A few things resonate more than others – Tom Raworth’s Earn Your Milk (especially ‘Letters from Yaddo’ and ‘Letter to Martin Stannard’);…
Mike Jenkins on how he writes a poem
“All poems are journeys without a known destination, but none more so than those which derive from an inspirational moment.” There are no rules. No self-help guides and no course which can tell you definitively the way. Each poet must find their own method, or lack of one. For me, different kinds of poems generally…
Rosemarie Corlett on how she writes a poem
“I don’t follow a skeleton, or pad out a structure, rather the poem emerges like a road lit by headlights.” I never know what a poem will be about when I start writing it. And if it’s a successful poem, I won’t know what it’s about once it’s finished. I write line by line, and…
So Mayer on how they write a poem
“[T]o write, for me, is to fill my mouth with worry. To worry at something: at tooth with tongue; seeking instabilities, gaps and that fleshy give. Feel it, and the anxiety floods in. But you keep fraying at it, a frayed knot: afraid not.” ‘we have filled our mouth with worry, beads.’ — Veronica Forrest-Thomson,…
Jonathan Edwards on how he writes a poem
“Beyond all of them stands time, that vicious git, with its sieve of tiny holes we all want to try and sneak a poem through. But before all those the writer has his own sieve and, let’s face it, most of us have crap sieves for our own work.” In ‘Teaching the Ape to Write…
Rhian Elizabeth on how she writes a poem
“I like how words can fall on the page of a poem, how words look when they are put in funny and wrong places. I like not having the pressure of capital letters and full stops. It feels a bit naughty, a bit cheeky. And I like being cheeky.” I keep saying, whenever I’m asked…