“[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,…
“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…
“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…
“I eventually chose to respond to an anecdote he told about his five-year-old daughter walking off in a park. Instead of telling her to come back he started following her, wondering what she was thinking about. This went on for about an hour, during which she never looked back, and when she finally did, it…
“Perhaps this is the playwriting side of my nature, but I want the poem to retain something of my present tense, my breath and body.” I don’t know how I write a poem. Saying that poems come to me or through me—an image, a voice, the misty, muddy movement-without-form—may sound precious or pompous (and of…
For the month of April we have the inimitable Peter Finch musing on how to craft a poem: Collect the data. All of it. Research endlessly. Nothing should be below notice. The more specialist the better. Scour and store. Absorb this stuff. Think about it and then absorb some more. When there’s enough the poem will emerge….
‘As the years roll by I feel I am no longer waiting at a dried-up riverside, instead I’m slowly metamorphosing into the river, and that is as much as I can hope for.’ Since discovering the mental landscape existed over a decade ago I’ve realised how important it is to cultivate this space when creating….
‘See if the draft poem has thematic and technical substance or throw it away. Subject it to all the tests you can think of.’ In September’s instalment of ‘How to write a poem’ Frances Presley shares her lovely and instructive wisdom for approaching a poem: 1. Write a sequence of poems with a theme and…
We kick off 2018 with the marvellous poet, Ailbhe Darcy, on how she writes a poem: First, invest monstrously in your own personal mythology. Novelists build a fictional world for the space of a volume or several volumes, but the poet builds a fictional world across an entire life. Then, disagree. A poem is a disagreement….
