We need your help to raise £3000 for Wales Young Poets Award, a new bilingual competition and anthology for young people aged 10-17 across Wales and the UK. The competition will be free to enter and its theme will be empathy. We will produce an anthology that will find a home in every school in Wales….
Whenever I read a new collection, I always copy out poems that I love – I suppose it’s a way of keeping those poems close to me but also, in a more nerdy way, seeing how they’ve worked line breaks for example, and finding out how the poems feel as I type them out. I love learning like this.
For me, the persona poem was the gateway drug into writing a more mature form of poetry. It offered a distancing mechanism – the ability to project the personal onto the classical. Poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were hugely influential. And then there’s Louise Glück. Her sequence-length lyric, Meadowlands, which depicts her failed…
Growing up in the countryside, I suppose it was natural for me to be drawn to nature poetry. The first poetry book I owned was Ted Hughes’ Selected Poems. I still have most of it; the back cover is missing and many of the pages have been punctured or torn by canine teeth – of the…
“‘A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream,’ by Wallace Stevens, has, for some time, been the poem I return to when I have truly lost my way.”
Kathy Miles reviews collections from Glyn Edwards, Maggie Harris and Hanan Issa.
Are you a new writer looking to publish your poems? Here are 5 tips to become a published poet.
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“I hurry the final stretch to get the poem on paper. Repeating it over and over, scared I will forget.”
