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”
Category: Interviews
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.”
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