Poems
“We-Poetics” – How I Did It: ‘Body Logic’
Because first of all, it’s not just I. Even in poetry, even the lonely writing on a lined pad or keypad. Even that has its communal moments. No one does anything on one’s own. And that goes for writing, too. When I read a book of poems that move me, I know I am moved…
Tiphanie Yanique
‘Mrs Arnolfini’s interior’
My husband’s seville oranges are ripening on the window ledge; he punctures and sucks at them before flinging the pith to the pigs. When he’s not trading silk, he likes to paint still lives, nature morte. I know this child’s another phantom. I gather my dress under my ribs, rest a hand where its head…
Rachael Matthews
How I Did It: Poem in Which…
In darker periods, I spend far too many hours Wikipedia-hopping: clicking from link to link and half-learning all sorts of extraordinary things. I find Wikipedia a real horde of things to write about and poems to find. My favourite articles are the list pages, and the best of these (and a good portal to further…
Harry Josephine Giles
Shey Hargreaves reads ‘Death at Sea’ and ‘Junior Doctors’
Shey Hargreaves, our former Digital Poet-in-Residence with 1215.today, reads two of the poems written during her residency. The poems are also hosted over on the 1215.today site. Junior Doctors is “an homage to all those toiling long, red-eyed hours in the fluorescent throb of hospital corridor”. You can read Shey’s blog post and poem about the…
Ali Lewis
‘Sea Between Us’
The sea turns its beautiful face away, turns its lily-face to the sun. The sea gets cat-close, its muscles ripple under fur as it stalks off alone. In the sea-mirror waves are clouds, whale moon, spaceships polystyrene islands of debris. In the sea-mirror your hand is fairground-strange. The sea is a graffiti artist, writes huge…
Anna Kisby
How I Did It: ‘Interlude’
This poem was the first poem I tried to write after a period of about three years during which I didn’t write at all. During this time, I was making some significant discoveries about my family, my mother and myself, unpicking the deep legacies of intergenerational trauma. One day, after work, I took myself to…
Ruby Robinson
How I Did It: ‘The Survivors’
I began the poems in Disko Bay during a midwinter residency at Upernavik Museum in Greenland. My brief was to write about the history of the island and its present-day community but I hoped to record some observations on the wider Arctic environment too. However, the weather conditions were so extreme I couldn’t walk much…
Nancy Campbell
How I Did It: ‘Upstairs’
‘Upstairs’ is the pivotal poem in my collection Distance. Six years ago, illness forced my mother to live, sleep and eat in the downstairs part of the house. This was the inspiration for ‘Upstairs’. My original intention was to highlight how, in old age, we slowly lose the world we created. But to write it…
Ron Carey
‘Seashell Sound Recordist’
Pick up any Jack-knife Clam, Triton, a Sharks Eye or Pearwhelk. Place any Conch to your ear and you will hear my work. Have you ever heard the Sea Biscuit, the Thick Lucine or the Kitten’s Paw? Because I have travelled from sandbank to coastline and shore to shore, passed through raging squalls, over calm…
Poetry School
‘Fragrance of roses’
They left the heat of Uganda deep into the night on Alitalia flight 204. Their parents waved, silent on the tarmac. The smell of kerosene gave way to the fragrance of roses on Raihana’s handkerchief. She and Fahima already had a grip on Britain, what with Jane Eyre, The Avengers, Robin Hood. Greeted by thrashing…
Poetry School
‘In The Museum of Antiquated Offices: Exhibit C, fax machine’
I jerk awake some nights, jabber in tongues of space-age dolphins, a blip blip red-eye scanning lost horizons for a connecting signal. A curl of white paper blooms – like winter roses under glass – briefly warm to touch as grey smoke ghosts of secretaries pass. I crave the tap of polished fingernails the gossip…
Emma Simon
‘The Court Verbatim Shorthand Reporter’
I have wielded my pencil like a sword at 140 words per minute to record the minor mis-doings of the inhabitants of Staines, frantically squiggled dots, dashes, chays, jays, hays and yays ─ in days before a ‘hay’ or a ‘yay’ was a common greeting and Pitman 2000 sounded so futuristic at around a double-decade…
Jill Munro
‘The First Day of Galungan’
Rain, rain, endless tropical rain, day after day. Boredom blooms heavy-lidded with flaming stamens that drive me out out of the villa, in spite of the rain, in search of diversion, out down the long, winding Balinese lane that runs past Pura Petitenget to restaurants and shops. I have the world to myself, but there…
Judith Rawnsley
‘Stones’
Before he came, I lusted for those stones – my flesh should bruise and split, my bones should break to speak the pain of loss and shame, the words we couldn’t speak. He cast in dust the words, “I’m yours”; the heavy breathing crowd clutched stones as heavy as their virtue, hard as heartbreak. The…
Jen Emery
‘Dear Cape Town,’
I would like to give you a giraffe like the one in the central park of Cuidad Juárez. In that northern Mexican town they treat their giraffe like a tourist. I’d watch our giraffe amble along Buitengracht, meander through Bo Kaap and District Six. Volunteers would gently shoo her into the Groote Schuur Estate where she would…
Kerry Hammerton
‘The Have the Want and the Next’
This week I’ve talked about how, by and large, we in the UK are free to express ourselves as we wish, within certain broad boundaries defined by hate speech legislation, defamation law and so on. Wonderful though this may be for many of us, some UK citizens are actually denied this right. They are people…
Shey Hargreaves
‘A Hymn to the Ordinary’
Zsa Zsa Gabor’s very fond of a door especially in oak or a light sycamore – her sister-in-law loves a long corridor and a friend of her father has a thing for his floor – it was Dior before but it’s not anymore – we should try to be more like Zsa Zsa Gabor. Don’t…
Kate Davis
‘Three exercises in style (after Raymond Queneau)’, ‘Acronymic poem (after Schuldt)’, and ‘Snowball’
‘THREE EXERCISES IN STYLE (AFTER RAYMOND QUENEAU)’ ‘ACRONYMIC POEM (AFTER SCHULDT)’ ‘SNOWBALL’ COMMENT Kate Wakeling is a writer and ethnomusicologist based in Oxford. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog and The Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt). These texts were written on Steven J. Fowler’s Maintenant!…
Kate Wakeling
‘Wooden’
I am carving your initials into my chest shedding oak in your name, mahogany heavy. I am beside you with skin like saw dust skin is saw dust. Neck braced with trunk, stiff – like the first time. Burning bark under duvets. For all the times we lay in silence thinking of walks, of holding…
Sophie Fenella
How I Translated It: ‘It makes two signs…’ by Krystyna Miłobędzka
Translating is attending to what might happen in language and what might occur between languages. As readers and writers we know this space intimately – the in-betweenness where we can experiment, hesitate, discover, doubt, try again. ‘“Try” – there’s so much faith in it, and so much resignation. But we keep trying. … Only such…
Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
‘Look Out Tree’
Two ghosts sat in a tree gusting songs and talking, yakking about the moon round as a bullet hole. The sky is soldered black, yet to be opened by dawn, thunk it with clods of earth and know it never will. Everything but those ghosts has stopped. Grass stopped dog stopped tree stopped whole turning…
Rebecca Mackenzie
How I Translated It: ‘The mask of the angry one’ by Brecht
The translation of poetry, as well as being, famously, impossible, is, for the translator, the most wonderful and most punishing form of close reading. There is no limit to the aspects of the poem at hand to which the translator must desire to be attentive. Form in all its forms, meaning in all its meanings:…
Tom Kuhn
‘A Blue and Pink Encounter at the Mall’
COMMENT Jinny Fisher is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and was previously a classical violinist. She lives in Somerset and is a member of Juncture 25 and Wells Fountain Poets. She has been been, or is about to be, published in The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Prole and Ink, Sweat and Tears. “I wrote (or…
Jinny Fisher
‘Bound’
COMMENT Vasiliki Albedo Bennu lives in Greece. Her poems have been published in magazines, recently in ‘The Interpreter’s House’, ‘Lighthouse’ and ‘Beloit Poetry Journal’. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice. “This poem was written for Claire Trévien’s ‘Cosmic Compositions’. The challenge was to write something inspired by ‘Space Travellers’. My intention…
Vasiliki Albedo
‘Andromeda As A Teacher’
COMMENT Majella Kelly is a poet, photographer and teacher from the West of Ireland. She happens to teaches teenagers in a prefab, behind the main school building, and here she re-imagines the students as her own constellation. The poem came about after a prompt from Claire Trévien on her ‘Cosmic Compositions’ course at…
Majella Kelly