“I like to think of poems as machines crafted to destroy what we know, in order to access forms of wisdom or something archaic about our nature which we might not otherwise have consciously encountered.”
Category: Poems
Mat Riches: How I Wrote ‘Tomato Plants’
“I’d love to say that was a deliberate choice, that it was a way of showing the protagonist is boxed in like the tomatoes, or like the holes you cut into a tomato growbag, but I’d be lying.”
Megan J Arlett: How I Wrote ‘Fresh Meat’
“My poems often float around in fragmented and incomplete drafts until that first, encapsulating line arrives on the page”
Bethany Handley: How I Wrote ‘Cling Film’
“Poetry provides the space for readers to bear witness to ableism. This calling out of ableism in poetry can be unsettling for audiences if they recognise their own attitudes or behavior.”
Rakyah Assam: How I Wrote ‘The Scientist’
“I think the way that foreignness affects your relationship with the place that you’re in has a lot of parallels to the way that we operate in dreams in this way.”
Hussain Ahmed: How I Wrote ‘Yoruba Abecedarian I’
“In most cases, the poems are hardly fully made, they come in lines, phrases and flashes.”
Thomas Jackson: How I Wrote ‘marinara as the world ends’
“I didn’t write this with an agenda, but it pulled together several fractures in my nostalgia.”
Kim Moore: How I Wrote ‘A Psalm for the Scaffolders’
“I always write in prose first, longhand in my notebook, like I’m talking to someone”
Des Mannay: How I Wrote ‘Hoxton girl in a “Last Poets” t-shirt’
“[Voices] were the first musical instruments, therefore all poetry has a music, and in some cases rhyme, repetition, and participation built into it…”