“It’s therefore frustration that compelled me to write this poem, and a desire to illuminate how deeply compassion can be felt even when it’s not always immediately apparent”
Category: Interviews
Jane Houston: How I Wrote ‘Ponies’
“The poem is about a human experience of illness, due to a virus in the human body. But the illness itself takes a human form, and our abuse of shared ground gives the poem its monochrome palette.”
Mason Lloyd: How I Wrote ‘Is this ok?’
“[No] matter how many words I put down, it didn’t touch on what I was trying to get to. Instead, what I have tried to do is not say it, but use the space in-between, the felt space, and use that as a vehicle to get me, and hopefully the reader, closer to something.”
Maggie Harris: How I Wrote ‘Legacy’
“I was attempting to write song lyrics before I realised it was poetry I was writing”
Hilary Menos: How I Wrote ‘Lonely Hearts’
“Space is, of course, the “final frontier” but there are other areas for exploration, such as the deep ocean, and the human mind.”
Euron Griffith: How I Wrote ‘History’
“For me, inspiration for poems tends to arrive when you least expect it and I find that my mind is particularly receptive to ideas when it’s in ‘neutral’ or ‘resting’ mode. Which is why this one came to me while I was queueing up to be served in Ashton’s Fish stall at Cardiff Market one Saturday afternoon”
John Freeman: How I Wrote ‘Staircase with Handbag’
“The very act of writing a poem implies that one hopes it will be found valuable, helpful even, by a reader or readers”
Caitlin Tina Jones: How I Wrote ‘In two hundred years we live in a cleft of Bannau Brycheiniog National Park’
“I think that titles are best used when they tell us something about the poem – specifically, something that you may be otherwise unable to say within the body”
David Lloyd: How I Wrote ‘Devil on Wheels’
“I hope that along with evoking an artist’s sensibility and intellect at a young age, my poem also conveys [Richard] Burton’s powerful forward motion in life”