Vasko I’ve got it in my hand now, the hefty slab of it, Vasko Popa Complete Poems and I thought I’d have a go at saying summat about it. Now, I love Popa and over the last year he has been the biggest influence over my work. At a fundamental level Popa has altered my…
Category: News
Elizabeth Porter on the poems that inspire her
When I was a child there was something called ‘Chip Club’ – a leaflet given out at school once or twice a year, from which we could order books. I was lucky, my mum always bought me a book, and in 1974 I chose 100+ American Poems, edited by Paul Molloy. Why? Maybe for the…
A Poetry Library for Wales, Adam Sillman & Rhys Owain Williams (Poetry Wales 55.3)
Why didn’t Wales have one? Where should one be established? Who should be involved? Typically the conversation would conclude in one of two ways: enthusiastically agreeing to boozy plans to open a poetry library ourselves, or reasoning that someone, somewhere, must already be doing something.
Di Slaney on the 10 poems that inspire her
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupry I’ve been asked to answer an excellent question about poems, books or poets who have influenced me, and…
Nurture Young Talent: Support our Crowdfunder and help create a new anthology and competition for young writers
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….
Ben Bransfield on the poems that inspire him
Another guardian of the soul for me is Mary Oliver, who I always turn to when I need a quiet jolt back into my ‘one wild and precious life’
Katrina Naomi on the poems that inspire her
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.
Lauren Pope on the poems that inspire her
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…
Jan Harris on the poems that inspire her
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…