“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.”
Category: Interviews
Steve Logan: How I Became a Poet
“I began to write poems and music in earnest to save my life”
Astra Papachristodoulou: How I Wrote ‘Unbodied’
“Given [the constraint of short form], I like to utilise materials that, in conjunction with the short text, offer additional meaning to ultimately make the poems multi-layered, esoteric and more nuanced”
Daljit Nagra: How I Wrote ‘We’re Lighting Up The Nation’
“I didn’t want to be a poet who knocks out book after book of ‘auto-pilot’ poems, so I stopped writing the thirty-line poem and sought something that would challenge me. I waited to be astonished by something different.”
How I Write a Poem: Best Writing Tips of 2023
A look back at some of the best writing tips from our How I Write a Poem interviews in 2023. Share your favourites with us!
Anna Blasiak: How I Wrote ‘EMBROIDERY. HAFT’
“[I]nstead of having two separate language versions of the poem, I ended up with one, which brings the languages together… This, I think, reflects how the brain of a bilingual/multilingual person works”
Muskaan Razdan: How I Wrote ‘Duplex’
“I love how agile and stripped back it is as a form. It doesn’t allow you to dwell, chewing away unnecessary information and only leaving the reader with the heart of the idea”
Content warning: mentions/implications of domestic or intimate partner abuse
Rachel Carney: How I Wrote ‘Unremarkable’
“The poem is an attempt to look back as well as forward, to acknowledge the creativity of women past, present and future”
Anthony Wade: How I Wrote ‘A Lost Voice’
“It is in the editing-amending-polishing phases of the original thought-story-memory that I listen to the rhythms of the language, to the unfolding of the scenes, if more than one, and sense when there is what I think of as a key change, almost as though it is music”