Jenny Danes: How I Wrote ‘In Emergency Break Egg’
“I think it took me many years of writing for humour to have earned its place, and for me to acknowledge it as part of my poetic voice.”
Category: Poems
Edward Heathman: How I Wrote ‘Night Watch’
“To me, place is about the relationship of distance-to-closeness. How connected someone feels to their national identity can be just as important as how direct or indirect a speaker is in a poem, or how straightforward or mysterious an image is.”
Katy Giebenhain: How I Wrote ‘Iowa River, October Wind’
“The Iowa River was right there before me. Like all rivers it has a history. It was no leap to think about the way we treat performers and natural resources.”
Julia Forster: How I Wrote ‘Drawing, 1988’
“Perhaps that’s what this poem is about: the many-dimensional reality in which we live as adults as opposed to the constraints of a childhood in which we are operating on different brain wave lengths.”
A.M. Juster: How I Translate a Poem
“I am a traditionalist and work hard to keep the meaning very close to the original while also echoing the sounds and rhythms of the original.”
Adele Evershed: How I Wrote ‘Dirty Laundry’
“‘Dirty Laundry’ deals with nostalgia, memory, and the passage of time, but if I were to sum it up in one word, I’d say – hiraeth, a word any Welsh expat knows well.”
Sean Swallow: How I Wrote ‘Rereading Blackberrying in Uwchmynydd’
“Even out there at the tip of the Llyn peninsula, with Bardsey Sound beneath me, the bleakness of our environmental predicament felt inescapable. I envied [Plath] not writing under that weight.”
Content warning: mention of suicide
Jane Campbell: How I Wrote ‘Campfire’
“My hope for this poem is that it reminds dykes of our unity when so much of the world tries to undermine us. Campfires give us a way of celebrating the rare joy of being in a majority.”
Forester McClatchey: How I Wrote ‘Elephant in Hannibal’s Army’
“Perhaps the best one can hope to do when writing in the voice of an animal is urgently point to one’s own ignorance.”
Content warning: animal cruelty, war