Quotes compiled by Beth Mcaulay | Words by Frances Turpin
“One piece of advice is to not worry about whether anyone’s going to see the work; to make, to immerse yourself in your work and enjoy it“
Suman Gujral, How I Wrote ‘Lion’
Note: this is a scheduled post. Poetry Wales is closed for the Christmas break until Monday 8th January
How do poems get written? This is the question that Poetry Wales‘ ‘How I Write a Poem’ series aims to answer – from the granular, nitty-gritty, pen-and-paper-or-notes-app details to the more esoteric, philosophical elements of seeking inspiration and getting to know the poem as if it were a person
‘How I Write a Poem’ is a series for readers and for writers – for those interested in a specific poem or poet, sure, but also for the people who want to know how the sausage gets made, metaphorically speaking. As 2023 draws to a close and we gear ourselves up for another fifty-odd weeks of sharing these interviews with you in 2024, we want to take a moment to look back and reflect on some of the most memorable writing tips poets have shared with us this year.
On Form
The poems we feature in ‘How I Write a Poem’ take many different shapes and use many different styles. Here’s how some of our interviewees make their decisions about how the poem looks on the page:
“Because I also tend to work in syllabics, there is also that framework to work within… that will often cause the enjambment to take on a life of its own, but it must be said that I don’t let it take over. You can’t just break the line because you’ve hit the syllable count – despite that being the path of least resistance”
Mat Riches, How I Wrote ‘Tomato Plants’
“How much white space there is around a word is crucial, for example, if a longer line is followed by a shorter one, then the last word will be even more prominent because of the white space around it, than where two lines are of an equal length. The overall shape of a poem is something else I prioritise, and I think about how the form of the poem can reiterate the content. Here the zigzagging form might help suggest the meandering thoughts of the speaker and their contemplative walk home”
Alexandra Corrin Tachibana, How I Wrote ‘The Names of Things’
“For me, line breaks arise from breath, that is, the length you might expend on saying a line out loud. That seems to occur naturally in a poem, it tells you when to stop. Especially, I think, when working with long lines – the poem won’t sprint if it’s meant to walk, it won’t expend its energy unnecessarily. Shorter, pithier lines tend to be jumping hurdles, but they’re built for that”
Fred Johnston, How I Wrote ‘Interview’
“My process when it comes to short lines, versus long, when it comes to an opening line is actually much more ‘feel’; whereas the craft would come later, after the broadness of the work is sculpted and the hewing begins. I’d definitely consider writing poetry to be more a sculptor at the rock-face, at least at times, with a dash of the composer listening for the motifs, the rises and falls, and the music…
But, to put it into practical terms, I’d write the work, and be it short or long… I’d then read through it several times, and watch the spacing, watch the flow, first seek words to chop out, read it aloud, find what falls and rises, and if I stumble, the reader stumbles, so anything I stumble over, gets cut…”
Oisín Breen, How I Wrote ‘Even Small Birds Can Render Planets unto Ash’
“Poetry doesn’t only have to exist as words on a page in a standard house font. We read them out loud, we listen to others, we watch them be performed. I love graphic design, typography and posters. I made a really nice Instagrammable 7” square image for this poem, in the style of the record that inspired it – but it wasn’t enough. This poem is about noisy overlapping messages, it’s about everything being too much, so I started to posterize it. An advertisement for being overwhelmed, with key points clear for those of us without the concentration spam to read the fine print”
Jamie Woods, How I Wrote ’86K Superhighway’
“I think I generally use enjambment to contribute to the sense of rhythm of a poem, to create little interruptions, sometimes even with a surprise waiting after the line break… Writing something, a poem or a story or anything really, to me feels like transcribing what I hear inside my head onto the page. So how to convey tonal changes and potential different voices? Enjambment can contribute to capturing those tonal changes a little”
Isabel de Andreis, How I Wrote ‘The Glove of Cymru’
“I often write in plain, direct language. For me it is the subject and material of the poem that drives its shape. I have experimented with writing in more traditional ways, but a subject like dementia that is raw and jagged, can lose its attack if smoothed and rounded into a neat form. I don’t want to substitute a fresh or apt word just for one that rhymes or fits a metric scheme… I write poems from many different angles, tones and perspectives, but the loose linkages in this poem reflect the form of the sequence I am writing. The narrative unfolds in an indirect way, gradually building up layers of a life, one poem loosely linking to another”
Caroline Smith, How I Wrote ‘Links’
On Purpose
The question might begin with how, but we also want to know why our interviewees write poems – a question every writer has asked themselves, at one point or another, when they’re staring at a blank sheet or screen, or awake in the wee hours scribbling down ideas that just can’t wait until the morning. Here are some of our 2023 poets on the reasons they write, just in case you need a reminder…
“Writing is the best way I know of checking in with myself. It’s a good way of naming what is going on and making meaning, or finding meaning, in a world that often appears to have very little shape or form… I don’t think of writing as therapy though. I don’t see my own writing as therapy… I see writing as self-engagement and self-discussion. We are what we are able to talk about. The blank page grants us space“
Paul Deaton, How I Wrote ‘Harvest’
“I am a new poet and the current times are dominated by electronic devices. I feel I’m constantly receiving information from a constantly increasing number of sources. I consider my role as a poet is to filter this abundance of information, distil it and provide a brief and clear poetic image that keeps only the meaningful, the things that need to be said… My aim is to generate small, crystal pieces that shed light to various moments of being. It is the job of the reader to expand, read through the layers of my text and decide whether it’s worth of multiple readings and further thought/development. My short poems initiate the discussion, they don’t complete it”
Ilias Tsagas, How I Wrote ‘Language Matters’
“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. This means leaving gaps open, both in how we experience life and in how we write, for the unexpected to enter, including when the unexpected is something unpleasant about ourselves.”
Camille Francois, How I Wrote ‘Let us go down, and there confound’
On Readers
Do you write for the reader, or just for yourself? How do you convey the ‘right’ message to them, or do you let them create a message for themselves? Here are some of our poets on the relationship they have to the reader during the writing process:
“I don’t think consciously of the reader when I draft a poem, but I am attentive to how my brain processes units – of sound, of meaning – in time, and this guides me to write a certain way, by integrating the possibilities offered by delaying. Because the reading brain hates a vacuum and will usually supply something where there is nothing, this means that for an instant, both the poet and the reader’s meanings are happening simultaneously in the time it takes for the line to turn“
Camille Francois, How I Wrote ‘Let us go down, and there confound’
“I hoped that if the reader could feel what that walk was physically like – how the muscle-memory felt, how the ground changed underfoot, how the air changed as we climbed […] they would bring their own memories into the poem. Yet the climb is recreated by dismissing all this, by describing what I’m not going to write about, so that the views from the summit stand out – as does the sense of achievement”
D. A. Prince, How I Wrote ‘3.00 a.m.’
“One piece of advice is – that I had actually – is to not worry about whether anyone’s going to see the work; to make, to immerse yourself in your work and enjoy it. And don’t make it for anything in particular, but just make it for the sake of making, because [the] kind of creativity where you don’t kind of shoebox yourself into thinking we have to be one thing or another, that’s very liberating… Because then you can just make anything that you feel like making, and that quite often, it’s almost out of playing that the best work comes”
Suman Gujral, How I Wrote ‘Lion’
“Like a lot of poets, I struggle with endings. How do we know when a poem is done? I am often in the position where the best course of action seems to be to simply get rid of the last line or two. I have a bad habit of overwriting… I really think the last line is a lot like the last paragraph of an essay, and I tell my [students] that that last paragraph should be a pathos-centric message or really a feeling that they want their readers to walk away with. I think the same is true of a poem. What taste do you want to leave in a readers’ mouth? Is it sweet, or salty, or does it leave you wanting more? Do you want it to linger bitterly? Why?”
Caleb Nichols, How I Wrote ‘BUS STOP, GWYNEDD’
On How To Write a Poem
As in, how to actually sit down and get it done. How to find inspiration and ideas in your every day life. How, in other words, our poets wrote their poems:
“I have tricks that work for me which seem very counter-intuitive. Whilst I’m writing this kind of poem, I distract myself. I answer emails and messages, look up definitions of words whilst in the middle of writing a line, accept interruptions from my children, make a cup of tea or bring in the washing etc. Then, without consciously thinking about it, I continue from where I left off. My back-brain does the work. So, ironically, I have to have a level of self-estrangement in order to write about my own intimate feelings without the noise of my own critical voice or grandiose expectations. To be vulnerable, I have to silence my own reasoning protective shields“
Hannah Linden, How I Wrote ‘Each Morning, New Leaves’
“Only a few days ago I was asked to provide a writing tip for this year’s National Poetry Competition, and I said to keep a dream diary. My poems are frequently inspired by dreams. I’ve crafted some of my more mystical pieces using fragments of bizarre and/or beautiful dreams. Our subconscious is infinitely creative, and tapping into it provides us with an overflowing well of images, associations and the wildest plots. Oftentimes, our dreams tell us something about the bigger picture, such as collective consciousness and deeply engrained societal norms, tales and stories”
Christina Hennemann, How I Wrote ‘The Grim Reaper and the Empress’
Thank you for joining us on this brief journey through only a handful of our interviews from this year. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and we welcome you to share your own tips, and your favourite interviews from this series, in the comments below
Thank you to Beth Mcaulay for compiling these quotes for us
Explore the ‘How I Write a Poem’ archives for yourself here