Lynne Hjelmgaard: How I Became a Poet
“When I attempted to put my feelings on paper it became clear that it would be a long, slow process with hard work and determination at its core”
Category: Interviews
Stuart Pickford: How I Wrote ‘Backchat’
“If you let your characters speak, you can give them enough rope to hang themselves: they reveal their own nature without the narrator having to comment; you’re showing and not telling”
Jefferson Holdridge: How I Wrote ‘Hands’
“She noticed my predilection for rhyme and then warned that using it should sound ‘blindingly inevitable'”
Katie Munnik: How I Wrote ‘The Invention of Rope’
“You might say that writing this poem was an act of unwinding”
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.”