Reading it aloud – poetry is, after all, just written down speech – allow the poem to have a moment to exist. The reader has to put as much care into the reading of the poem as the poet has into writing it. In the relationship between poet, poem and reader, every element has to pull its weight.
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Poetry is in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus .. or just what's in your heart
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(Poetry) It’s the place in language we are most human and we can see ourselves fully – far more than prose in fiction. A poem is able to hold so much in so little space. It’s a time capsule, a Tardis so much bigger on the inside than it seems on the outside.
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Every time a poet writes a poem it’s like it’s the first time. When you’ve finished a poem, you don’t know if you’ll ever write another one. Some poems arrive with a weight that’s more significant than other poems and you know it will take a lot of care to do it justice. Poetry, for so long now, has been the way I relate to everything. It’s like a companion. I can’t imagine ever being separated from it.
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The minute you decide to write a poem you are making artistic and technical decisions about rhyme and form and structure. Each one of those decisions pushes it away from the personal and makes it an artwork. If you were writing entirely personally, you would just write in that “Oh my god I’m so in love, I don’t know what to do with myself” voice. A poem moves away from you as you write it.
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I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
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(About her Mum) She was entrancing, fantastic at making up rhymes and stories. I think it was her Irish syntax and voice music that started my love of words.
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You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.
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They (Poems) come from lots of places: from personal experience; from memory. Things can be emotionally true even if they are not factually true. Not every poem has to be ‘from’ you even if it is ‘by’ you – other people’s voices come into my poetry.
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Look at Seamus Heaney or Jo Shapcott – poets that have proved they can reach a huge readership by the quality of their poetry.
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You can teach form. You can teach students how to write a limerick and when those forms become recognisable to the students then they can start to imitate them. I always start with my favourite one: “There was a young man from Australia, who painted his arse like a dahlia, tuppence a smell, went down very well, but thruppence a lick was a failure.” That’s not even the rudest one I teach.
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I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life. Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.
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I put together my first pamphlet when I was 16 - they were awful teenage stuff.
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