Damien B. Donnelly : part five

How does a poem begin?

Very often, for me, a poem begins when a fleeting visual image triggers that box of collected words in the mind, immediately forming an opening line or repeated phrase from the poem that's about to unfold. Most of these triggers for me are intimate, personal starting points that later leap out into a more generalized expression in order to draw the reader in, as if revealing a secret before letting the reader take hold of the lines so as to connect the poem with their own personal experiences. I am a constant picture-taker, always snapping photographs wherever I go, possibly trying to capture these moments of visual beauty in the same way that I capture later a poem on the page, everything is fleeting and sometimes poetry is my way of just keeping up and reminding myself of what I've seen before it's gone. The poem begins just before the visual fades. In the same way that sometimes I take a break from writing and paint until I’m inspired to write again, it is a constant circle of one thing ending and another taking flight.

Trish Bennett : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I did not engage with poetry at school. As a teen, I wrote poems under duress and never identified with the poetry of the Irish Intermediate and Leaving Certificate syllabuses. I completely switched off, although I did submit something to our school magazine. The Chaplin, Fr Charlie, singled it out to read at assembly and said it was brilliant. I was 16 or 17, sunk down in my seat as I was absolutely mortified! When I was approaching forty, I joined a Creative Writing class ran by Ruth Carr at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast. Ruth was the first person to show me a world of written poetry far removed from what was enforced at school.

Michelle Penn : part one

Michelle Penn’s debut pamphlet, Self-portrait as a diviner, failing (2018), won the Paper Swans Prize (UK). Recent poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Perverse, MIR Online, B O D Y and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. New work is forthcoming in The London Magazine, The Interpreter’s House, PN Review and Stand. Michelle plans innovative poetry/art/music events in London as part of Corrupted Poetry. michellepennwriter.com

Photo credit: Andy Tobin

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I share poems with a few small groups of poets. We know one another’s work well and have honest discussions about a poem’s strengths and weaknesses. (We also laugh a lot.) I tend to show a poem to at least one of these groups before revising it (and revising again and again and again…).

Thomas McColl : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I wouldn’t say I’m a great judge of when a poem is finished, but then I don’t think many poets are, and that’s why it’s good to have an editor. 

In terms of my latest book, Grenade Genie, it was the title poem that needed an editor’s input the most. By the same the manuscript was accepted for publication by Fly on the Wall Press, the poem, Grenade Genie, had already gone through dozens of drafts over a number of years, and each time I’d think it was finished and send it out to magazines, and then, each time it was rejected, I’d belatedly realise it needed further editing but, still, I couldn’t get it quite right or sometimes simply made it worse. So, having Isabelle Kenyon, the book’s publisher and editor, look over it, and identify what she thought was the crux of the problem, helped immensely. She came up with various suggestions regarding the poem’s middle section, and once we sorted that out between us, everything else then came together. At any rate, since the book’s publication, the poem Grenade Genie has turned out to be the one that people often mention as being the piece they like very much or even the most, and alongside that, the poem has now, finally, got published in a magazine – the legendary counter-cultural publication, International Times, no less – so I guess I can say, with a fair degree of certainty, that the poem, Grenade Genie, is, at last, after many years, finished. 

Alyse Bensel : part one

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020), and three chapbooks. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Indiana Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

Photo credit: Mercedes Lucero

What are you working on?

Lately, I have turned to hybrid essays and fiction writing. My poems have taken more prosaic, elongated turns, and so I have followed that turn in my latest focus: the dead and the missing in my life and familial history. My paternal grandmother was killed before her 30th birthday in a traffic accident. Her death and her very existence have existed on the periphery of my family since I can remember. And friends have died from overdoses or made terrible decisions that have effectively cut them off from society. These subjects continue to morph in how I approach writing about them, as they border the line between poem and essay and speculation. It’s both uneasy and exciting to not know what final shape this new work will take.

Shiksha Dheda : part three

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Well, to be really honest, I’ll admit that I was blissfully unaware that poetry has so many rules. In my ignorance, I had always assumed it was as Hemingway said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed”. I always thought of poetry as this comforting mistress when life was the embittered spouse! As it turns out, though, there are innumerable poetry forms, rules, writing methods  processes and so forth. I think, however, that I am going to stick my head in the ground and just pretend like those don’t exist. 

Shareen K. Murayama : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t know if a poem is ever finished because when I step back and squint a little, looking at a poem’s form, its bold strokes or highest point of contrast—sometimes even years after it’s been published—I tell myself to keep walking backwards, preferably out the back door, and maybe no one will remember I wrote this one. In fact, now I’m wondering if I’m rewriting the same poem, obviously using different words or scenarios, to replay-rewrite-finish new or arrive at a different landing in order to express what I feel compelled to share. Mechanically, I also feel like the poems need to be read out loud, claiming space (or not) as needed. Every turn or color or metaphor should be intentional or intentionally whimsical or exemplify some type of economy (or not).