“[This] poem represents the beginning of a willingness to engage in this new awe of the self through the prism of ancestry. It is an act of seeking permission to pursue this new wonder.”
Hannah Linden: How I Wrote ‘Each Morning, New Leaves’
“My poet mind is far wiser than I am. It takes me awhile to catch up with it.”
Jeff William Acosta: How I Wrote ‘of thee I sing’
“They came in like flashes, in fragments—a tapestry of thoughts. Writing poetry in a language that is not native to me, in a sense makes me think of ways or approach the English language in a different angle.”
Paul Deaton: How I Wrote ‘Harvest’
“I find that some poems I write, luckily, just seem to happen – I might get a first line, like a fish biting, and then, if I have time, I let the poem unfold itself, and see where that line takes me”
Suman Gujral: How I Wrote ‘Lion’ | Video Interview
“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. 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.”
Aaron Kent: How I Wrote ‘Between all of us like a Wavy Halo Form’
“After the brain haemorrhage I was put on very heavy sleeping tablets, and when they kicked in I began to write poetry, then I’d wake and find streams of subconscious thoughts, odd typos, and nonsense words which I’d later edit into a poem while conscious.”
D.A. Prince: How I Wrote ‘3.00 a.m.’
“I hoped that if the reader could feel what that walk was physically like, they would bring their own memories into the poem”
Adam Cairns: How I Wrote ‘Mum Dancing’
“The sonnet seems like a safe room to me. It has known dimensions, the four walls of its rhymes and the turn.”
After Dickinson and Disability | Watch the Panel
From the 2022 Tell It Slant Festival