“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”
“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.”
“[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”
“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
“The poem is an attempt to look back as well as forward, to acknowledge the creativity of women past, present and future”
Read the poems we’ve nominated for the Pushcart Prize
“It is in the editing-amending-polishing phases of the original thought-story-memory that I listen to the rhythms of the language, to the unfolding of the scenes, if more than one, and sense when there is what I think of as a key change, almost as though it is music”
“The more men that can look inside themselves and be comfortable with this the better. It enables us to be better humans, to take better care, both of ourselves and others”
“I like to gather together all manner of things to see me through the making of a poem… I don’t know what to expect so I take everything, just in case.”
