“You might say that writing this poem was an act of unwinding”
Category: Interviews
Alyson Hallett: How I Wrote ‘Split Tongues’
“It seems to me that all language grows out of the dirt, the shapes of hills, the mud of the fields and barks of trees”
Christian Wethered: How I Wrote ‘this is a 16-mm film of seven minutes in which no words are spoken’
“I love her cinematic urgency, like a shape-shifting spotlight that never settles on its subject”
Susanna Galbraith: How I Wrote ‘poem for an imaginary marriage’
“All of the images had come together and started to work on each other, and then that word seemed a little like a lightbulb that could help illuminate the poem, sort of let one question fall across it, maybe creating a sort of (albeit fragmented and nebulous) whole”
Laura Warner: How I Wrote ‘I love you, Helen Skelton’
“Within this poem there is definitely a sense of disclosing a long-held secret – a secret desire, perhaps – that fantasy of rummaging in the Blue Peter Badges, whatever that might mean. It’s as if the speaker has finally found their moment to say something, so they are going to say it all, let it spill out.”
Damian Walford Davies: How I Wrote ‘Selves’
“I hope there are fleeting readerly moments at the end of, and between, lines throughout the volume where the stomach jumps or the mind reaches for something that doesn’t quite materialise around the racing bend of the line, or materialises in an uncannily different form.”
Simon Maddrell: How I Wrote ‘Being Young & Queer: A Zuihitsu’
“Language is culture, history, social practice, politics, everything. It is both a product and source of all those things, and its loss is all the greater for it”
Nadine El-Enany: How I Wrote ‘Hobson’s choice’
“The beginning of a poem matters to me very much. I want to pull the reader right into the thicket. My favourite poems are those that snag me from the first line and make it impossible to pull myself free.”
Tracey Rhys: How I Wrote ‘He tells me how trees communicate…’
“I think that when we have children, many of us tend to turn the natural world into fairyland for a while, and share their entrancement with it.”