How to Write Poetry: Can Poetry Help Us Explore Queerness?

In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry and its place in their world. These interviews will cover creative writing tips, excelling in a poetry workshop, building a literary career, and finding your poetic voice. Here’s Kat Dixon on how poetry can help us explore queerness.

Kat will be running her course Queer Objects: Sidling Up to the Subconscious with us this Summer, starting Tuesday 3 June.

How has poetry helped you (or others) navigate queerness, identity, and self-discovery

I remember reading Andrew McMillan’s physical in the National Poetry Library before I was out. I sat on the floor in the stacks and devoured it. It was a time where I was struggling to take up space, and being in the corner of that poetry library helped me feel something that I hadn’t found the words for yet. The poems reached out to me.

I love reading a well-crafted poem and thinking, yes, I know that feeling. In those moments, the poet bridges time and space and reaches out to me from the page. It’s a kind of magic.

Much later, after one of my poems about ‘discovering’ queerness did the rounds online, people slid into my DMs and said the most wonderful things about how it spoke to them. I never expected that. Poetry holds a special place for me in terms of identity; it creates playful spaces, possible spaces, ‘what if’ spaces.

How can poetry as a process help to explore the subconscious?

Craft can hold you. When I’m not staring directly at something challenging, it can rise up from the sediments of my mind and find itself on the page. Craft can offer a form of safety. The container of the poem offers so much. Focusing on line lengths and rhymes and rhythms or form – or whatever crafty thing is preoccupying your conscious attention – gives space for your subconscious to breathe, to release. Learning process for me is learning how to occupy my monkey mind, giving it games, or free writing exercises, or formal structures to keep its hands busy.

Can you share a specific technique or exercise that has significantly improved your poetry/practice?

Free writing. It reminds me that, in the words of my mentor, we don’t need to spit out diamonds every time. It’s like stretching before exercise. You’ve got to warm up, find your way into it. Athletes don’t just run, they stretch, they do conditioning. Being a poet is more than making yourself sit down and write – you have to build practice around it.

I find obsession helpful. For a while I was so obsessed with writing tercets of iambic hexameter that I started dreaming in it (which is actually very annoying). I read poems aloud over and over and recorded myself reading them, and then listened again and again. I find once the rhythm has entered my bloodstream, words start falling out in that shape, and it’s easier for the juicy stuff to rise to the surface.

What advice would you give to poets who are exploring their queerness in writing for the first time?

Go to events, sit in a sea of dungarees and undercuts and breathe in the queer celebration. The joy of queer poetry nights and queer workshops is a special kind of joy. Try a course! Community is so important and hard to come by. It nourishes the soul.

Read. Poets like Mary Jean-Chan, Andrew McMillan, Franny Choi, JP Seabright, Dean Atta. The fourteen poems press release wonderful work. Dwell in those voices.

Let go. Don’t feel like you have to carry anything. Being queer doesn’t make you a spokesperson. You don’t have to be political and if anyone is telling you what you should write about, ignore them. Write what you care about, whether that’s octopus hearts or world peace or Jenga bricks. It’s all valid.

You don’t have to share. I write plenty of poems about my queerness that never see the light of day. Those poems are for me. I don’t owe them to anyone, and I can be honest in a different way if I know they’re staying tucked in the dark corners of my computer. Poetry is your playground; whatever happens in the world, they can’t take that away from you.

Kat Dixon is a queer writer based in London. Her poetry explores the intersections of modern life, social justice, and queer identity in a rapidly changing world. Kat’s work has been shortlisted for various prizes, including the Café Writers Prize, Verve Poetry Prize, and the Ver Prize. Her poetry appears in The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, Queerlings, Mslexia, and fourteenpoems and others; and queer anthologies such as Spectrum and Re:Creation Anthology.

Kat teaches at events like the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and The Poetry School, sharing ideas on the role of AI tools in the creative process. A digital inclusion researcher, she is passionate about how humanity adapts to and interacts with modern technology. Her poet-sculptor collaboration at APT Gallery explores how words intersect with visual play. Kat’s debut poetry pamphlet eat the glitter is published with Broken Sleep Books.

Kat will be running her course Queer Objects: Sidling Up to the Subconscious with us this Summer, starting Tuesday 3 June.

Image credit: @girlwithredhat