Q
Why is poetry important?
Q
When did you come to write your first poem?
Q
Why do you like working with other art forms and artists
Q
Does it make a difference, the shape of a poem on the page
Q
Would you read a poem, so I can hear how it works

Transcript

Q

Why is poetry important?

A

I think poetry celebrates language and sound in a way that other ways of writing don’t, or at least not in the same way. Obviously there are some really long poems out there but I think the smallness of poems can be really valuable. It means you can share them more easily, read them over and over more regularly and I think it means they have more power to cut through the noise of everyday life. The constraints of a poem, so size, metre, and rhyme for example, can also make them a safe place to talk about big, difficult things, things that you and I might not talk about otherwise. Poems can give us permission to feel sad, angry, scared, or anything else that might be going on for us and to explore that with words.

Q

When did you come to write your first poem?

A

We recently found a poem I wrote when I was five or six, maybe. It was a poem about my mum trying to get a suntan and I illustrated it and I’m sure that there were others. The one that I remember the most as a child is one that I wrote when I was eleven, and it was about my grandfather who brought me up and it was after his death. It got published in a book somewhere (I still don’t know where, I haven’t been able to find it) and then I stopped writing until I was twenty-nine, and got hit by a car and I was bed-bound, and it was really miserable. I found myself turning to poetry, except the poems weren’t miserable, they were actually quite uplifting. People told me they would be good for children and young people. And that’s how this whole poetry thing got started.

Q

Why do you like working with other art forms and artists

A

I love working with other artists and with other art forms because I think it helps keep me as creative as I can be. It kind of shakes things up a bit and stops me from getting stuck in my own ways. I also think it helps make poetry more accessible. I love writing poetry for the page but I also think that’s only part of the story and I love trying to bring poetry to life, to people who wouldn’t otherwise read or listen to or watch or enjoy poetry, by creating new things with it. So recently I’ve really enjoyed making little films with loads and loads of people performing a little line each, and also working with sound-designers. The sound-design and the poem and the words and the performance can help take you away to a place in your imagination you might otherwise not have gone to.

Q

Does it make a difference, the shape of a poem on the page

A

I think the shape of a poem, and the use of the page generally is hugely important. I spend a ginormous amount of time fiddling around with font size, the spacing, and punctuation and line breaks because the white space is as important, if not more, than the words themselves. I think shape is a defining feature of poetry. Poems don’t just run on to the end of a page in the same way a paragraph might, and if they do that’s a deliberate choice the poet has made. Instead, the lines are interrupted by space, and that space has an impact on how you read the poem, and what it means. And, of course, you can also use shape more explicitly. I recently wrote a poem in the shape of a heart. The poem is about friendship and it doesn’t mention the word ‘love’, but I hope that the heart-shape suggests what I’m trying to describe is love, the love of close friends.

Q

Would you read a poem, so I can hear how it works

A

I was going to go for a more light-hearted poem, one that’s easier to perform, but given what I’ve just been talking about in the context of poems allowing us to explore emotions, I thought I would perform ‘The Land of Blue’..

The Land of Blue

Across the valley it waits for you,
a place they call The Land of the Blue.

It’s far and near, it’s strange yet known –
and in this land you’ll feel alone,
you might feel tears roll down your cheek,
you might feel wobbly, weary, weak.

I know this won’t sound fun to you –
it’s not – this is the Land of the Blue.
It’s blue – not gold or tangerine,
it’s dark – not light, not bright or clean.

It’s blue – and when you leave, you’ll see
the crackly branches of the tree,
the golden skies, the purring cat,
the piercing eyes, the feathered hat

and all the other things that come
when you escape from feeling glum.

Across the valley it waits for you,
a place they call The Land of the Blue
and going there will help you know
how others feel when they feel low.

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