Home » Poets & Their Processes
My twelfth poetry collection, Rag Argonauts, has its fair share of long poems, including two rangy narrative sequences towards its end. One is a 19 page semi-confessional ‘Prufrockian’ outpouring drafted … Continue reading
Alasdair Paterson was a regular team member at Adrian Henri’s monthly readings . . .
I started writing in my mid-20s, having read little contemporary poetry. I was living in Liverpool, a place with a lot of accessible poetry going on, and soon I was … Continue reading
The poems included in LPM most recently (Issue Twenty Seven | Spring 2022 : from THE MESSENGER HOUSE – At Home 2020) are part of a much bigger project I … Continue reading
Maitreyabandhu: On going on too long
I didn’t start writing poetry until I was in my late forties. I’d read poetry fairly deeply by then, I’d read my Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, but the idea of … Continue reading
Liam Guilar: I want to tell you a story.
Shortly after I’d agreed to Linda and Claire’s invitation to write about my process, I realised how difficult it was going to be. When I read other poets’ accounts, I … Continue reading
John Greening: Taking a Line for a Walk
That remark of Keats’ about seeing the long poem as ‘the Polar star’ of poetry is always twinkling somewhere in my mind, however dense the lyric and epigrammatic cloud-cover. I … Continue reading
Anne Ryland: Distance and Intimacy
The moment when I sense a sequence of poems emerging is not dissimilar to the first sighting of the haar, the sea fog, as it rolls in on the north-east … Continue reading
Anna Reckin: The field and the turf: thinking about length and breadth
Working as I do with organic, open forms, length is always a consideration: an intrinsic part of how the poem works. For shorter poems – and some of my … Continue reading
Robert Minhinnick: About ‘Wild Swimming…’
About ‘Wild Swimming…’ “Nothing comes from nowhere” is a mantra that make increasing sense to me. My writing depends on memory, location, association. And writing, especially my poetry, sparks into … Continue reading
Ian Seed: A Process of Abandonment
I have little self-confidence when it comes to writing long pieces, and usually will only do so under extreme pressure, for example having to submit my PhD thesis in 2012. … Continue reading