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GREG FREEMAN

28/2/2022

Greg Freeman: Why I write

After dropping out of university after just one year – 50 years ago! - I didn’t really know what to do with my life, but started trying to write a novel, feeling that I might be better at being an observer rather than a participant, somehow. Within a few months I was lucky enough to land a job as a junior reporter on my local paper. Some years later I switched from being a reporter to working as a sub-editor, hoping that it would help my unsuccessful novel writing.

Sub-editing should involve condensing words to their essence, getting rid of anything that is unnecessary. Very much like poetry. An English teacher notorious for getting benignly intoxicated in the pub at lunchtime introduced us to the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse in the fourth form. Then there was The Mersey Sound, that inspirational anthology of Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, that opened up poetry to so many young people. No reflection on those three, but I wrote fairly awful adolescent poetry for two years, and gave it up when I went to uni. I didn’t take poetry up again until joining a creative writing group in 2004.

My latest pamphlet collection, The Fall of Singapore, marks the fulfilment of an ambition to tell my father’s story that stretches back more than three decades. Soon after he died in 1989 I went to the Imperial War Museum and asked to see war veterans’ accounts of the Death Railway. I tried writing a novel, but that didn’t work. I attempted to encapsulate the whole thing in a short story which made the shortlist at a Guildford literary festival competition. I wrote a sestina about the Death Railway called ‘Learning By Heart’ which was commended in a Wilfred Owen Association competition. Around the 75th anniversary of VJ Day, a poet friend suggested I publish a sequence. I thought no more about it until late last year when I realised the 80th anniversary of Singapore was fast approaching.

It’s thanks in great measure to Dempsey & Windle, who have turned it all around with remarkable sympathy and speed, that it has finally happened. At the heart of the collection is the experience of those prisoners of war in Thailand. My book is intended as a tribute to them all – to those who survived, and to those who sacrificed their lives.

Greg Freeman is the author of Marples Must Go! (VOLE Books, 2021) and The Fall of Singapore (Dempsey & Windle 2020)

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TRISHA BROOMFIELD

27/2/2022

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Trisha Broomfield's INSPIRATION

Other poets have always been a great source of inspiration and support, and being accepted as a fellow poet rather than just someone who writes is a great confidence boost. I have learnt a lot from others about different poetry forms and fallen in love with, amongst others, kyrielles, writing a dozen about our ongoing ill-fated building work. A visiting cat, now almost a resident, features in many, as does an imaginary crocodile (well we were flooded).

What inspires me to write? Memories often float to the surface to be embellished and stretched, or news items (usually misheard as I am busy cooking dinner). I once marvelled at the, ‘Slug Defences’ planned by the Government, thinking that with all the rain on my vegetable patch what a brilliant idea it was, until I heard the item again and realised that they had planned merely, ‘Flood Defences’. Sometimes I overhear things in queues, like the woman who told her friend she was wearing two corsets as one had no elastic left. As a result of this I scribble on anything to hand at the time from shopping lists to the backs of what can be important documents, which then become mysteriously misfiled.

Competitions focus the mind, and my mind needs a focus and usually a deadline otherwise poems sprout and seed like dandelions in my overactive imagination. Humour seeks an outlet and I find a sense of the ridiculous helps.

Recording regular poems for local radio helped me through the first Lockdown and panic of Covid. Knowing someone receives your words is satisfying, why else do we write? As the Zoom days replaced live readings and meeting over a glass of wine became but a misty memory, reaching out and sharing became even more important. Of course Zoom removed most of my pre performance nerves, though when I had to stand up on stage after a year of sitting smugly in front of a screen wearing a smart top and scruffy jeans, nerves returned. What also returned though was the love of live reading I had forgotten just how much I enjoyed sharing my work this way.

I find it hard not to write so please don’t ask what happens on those rare occasions when I can not. Writers’ block, thankfully, doesn’t visit often but when it does, like most writers I imagine, I feel bereft.

Trisha Broomfield is the author of three poetry pamphlets published by Dempsey & Windle. Her facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/TrishaJBroomfield

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HEATHER MOULSON

26/2/2022

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Heather Moulson: Why I write

This is hard to answer, it’s quite an intangible thing.   I‘ve never really asked myself why I scribble randomly on some paper, stare at a blank iPad or relocate to Poets Corner (it never works). I suppose it’s needing to express something, and being gripped with a sudden compulsion to write a piece on the top deck of a bus (267). Or jotting down something while leaning on a trolley in Tesco by the Ready Meal section. These ideas and thoughts can leave you so quickly that it becomes urgent you write it down.

Through Lockdown, I’ve been learning and taking on new forms of poetry which has been enlightening. My current favourite is the Didactic form, where there’s so much scope.   Triolets have also been huge fun. A gateway to a new world that’s familiar, yet not. I also forced myself to write a Didactic Hexameter just before Christmas. It took me days to come up with 14 lines – and I cheated with the stressed syllables – but I had to do it somehow. Worth the pain (I think). There really is so much to explore. So perhaps it’s simply a need to fulfil a potential.

Personally, so many memories engulf me and I feel the need to share them. I like to make them orderly on a piece of paper and put them in a rough sequence. However, a former schoolmate or boy I fancied in 1973 do jump the queue. The past gives us such a wealth of   material. Actually, that reminds me…..

Of course, pre-lockdown, there were so many opportunities to read live at The Keep and Poetry Café to name but a few. Did we really take that so much for granted? That alone gave me a huge incentive to write and share with poets, and to give each other support to carry on. Let alone all the lovely poetry friends I made. Once the cold hand of lockdown touched us, that journey became very hard until we were gifted with Zoom. Not the same but at least we could all reach out to one another in our homes.

Now, with live events opening up again, I feel we’re still a bit tentative and it will take a while for the magic to return. I’m happy to wait, and meanwhile I’ll get scribbling on an abandoned notebook. Now, where was I….?

Heather Moulson, author of ‘Bunty, I Miss You’ (2019)

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ALISON MACE

25/2/2022

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Why I Write: ALISON MACE

I write because I have to. I’ve felt always that writing poems is a compulsive activity; sometimes it has kept me revising till five in the morning! – a good sign, that, of a promising poem. Even when a poem seems to have written itself, just to have arrived, I’m likely to pick at it for days or weeks.

What lies behind this compulsion? Let’s go at this question from the other end: once written and licked into the best shape I can manage, a poem can be found to have had a cathartic effect. An example:

                                                 Sorry

Aunt, I look back at last, and I am sorry,
                        sorry for how we were, for things we said,
                        often unkind. We did each other no good.
I grieve now too for your fate: you’d never marry,
your Geoffrey cold under France, your heart a stone
as, smiling, you gave thanks, seeing each young brother*
come home unhurt from one war or another.
What longings you must have felt, but could not own.

You took me on, a grieving child, when you
were old and already ill; how hard you tried,
I see now, strove to do right, until you died –
crushed by the weight of all you had to do,
trapped in a mesh of toil, confusion, worry.
I never loved or thanked you. Edith, I’m sorry.

*Six younger brothers, all surviving.

Edith brought me up after my mother died when I was eight. I resented her from the moment I came home—not until after the funeral and a stay at an uncle’s— and she greeted me effusively as if, it seemed to me, she owned the place and I was now a visitor. We progressed somehow through the years till I left, but she was often ill, and always tired and stressed. I wasn’t much help to her. Getting older myself, I started to understand her life as the unprivileged, disappointing one it was: eventually she had slowly become senile: her only escape.
When I’d finished writing ‘Sorry’ I found I could love and respect Edith in memory as I had not done in her lifetime; and I was released from guilt. I had no such aim, though: it just insisted on arriving.

Even poems written to prescribed themes can sometimes turn out to be essential, springing directly from the psyche, and to yield similarly life-changing effects.
Alison Mace is the author of Last of the Cake Her first collection, Man in the Icehouse, was published by The High Window

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DENNIS TOMLINSON

24/2/2022

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Dennis Tomlinson — Why / How I write

After experimenting with poetry in my late teens and early twenties, I let it slip for a few years. While working as a postman in a Hertfordshire village, I went to a short evening course on American poetry. The morning after I’d attended the class on Sylvia Plath, I heard an unexpected voice inside my head: Think and write!
It took me a few years to settle on poetry again. I got a powerful impulse when I joined Poetry ID in Letchworth in 2006. They held writing workshops every week, where you really had to write something.

Still, my chief motivation for writing is to record something that otherwise would just pass by and in the end disappear into oblivion. At first I wrote down a lot of childhood memories, as in ‘Dining Room’, recalling my grandmother’s old house:
   Two Chinese with bulging brows,
   the Sages, reigned from the mantelpiece,
   gazing past the bright sash windows […]

That appeared in my first pamphlet, Sleepless Nights (Maverick Mustang Manuscripts, 2019). With similar motivation, I have written poems drawing on family history and many taken from personal experience. I hope that a poem gives a deeper insight and openness to interpretation than a photograph or a prose account.

Direct inspiration comes about in different ways. It may start with a haiku-like observation of nature, an emotive experience, a formal exercise or indeed stem from reading another writer’s poem or book. ‘In Orwell’s Footsteps’, published in Over the Road (Dempsey & Windle, 2021) was inspired by George Orwell’s memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Travel has been an important motive to write, though my wife and I no longer go on trips abroad.

My writing process is likewise varied. Generally, one or more lines occur to me, bearing the seed of the concept, and I build up from that. The original lines, not necessarily the opening of the finished poem, may be metrical, loose in form, syllabic, unrhymed or rhymed but they somehow match the concept. The basic composition may take an hour or so or it may stretch over years. The common feature is that I build up a poem step by step and then revise it, thinking, writing and thinking again. It’s almost like when I was a child, playing with Lego bricks until I was satisfied with my house or aeroplane.
Dennis Tomlinson is the author of Over the Road (2021)

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David Bleiman — 'Not Seeing the Woods for the Words'

23/2/2022

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"NOT SEEING THE WOODS FOR THE WORDS" — David Bleiman

Recently, I realised that, walking down my local river to the sea, my appreciation of the natural environment was heavily polluted…by words. My wife, alongside, could just sniff the air, but every sensation was, for me, experienced through remembered or gestational poetry. This thought, in turn, sparked a poem, Not Seeing the Wood for the Words, in my new pamphlet, Gathering Light: A Cramond Causeway.

To write poetry does require a pathological interest in language or languages, for sounds as much as meanings. It was the joyful discovery that Scots and Yiddish share a common soundscape, with that hard ch sound (as in loch or tochus)‒ the voiceless velar fricative‒ which led me to reimagine the lost dialect of Scots-Yiddish in The Trebbler’s Tale. On the way, I let the sounds lead me to playful phrases, such as the (as yet unpublished) dooked ma tochus i the loch (dipped my arse in the lake) in which the sense (or nonsense) comes for a ride on the back of the sound.

There is much else in the mix. Found language is important as is the curation of memory, grief and nostalgia. We live across the road from Fair-a-Far Cottages, a row of workmen’s cottages named after the Gaelic for ridge of the cultivated ground. But my father used to call them Faraway Cottages, which led to a poem oozing sentimental remembrance of my dad, whilst deploying his own wordplay.

Short poetry courses and one-off workshops have been useful. I was sceptical about writing a poem off a random prompt but find that it can work wonders. Polly Atkin invited us to grab any object in the room in which we were sitting and write a few lines. I picked my Lacquer Wood Fiddler, a klezmer fiddler, acquired in Moscow twenty years ago, which has become my mascot. I read the poem at my first 1,000 Monkeys open mic, with the fiddler at my shoulder. Janice was impressed until I explained that he was sitting on an ironing board (I hadn’t ironed a shirt since March 2020 and the ironing board was repurposed for Zoom events).

I could say more‒ about dreams and getting the words down before the person from Porlock comes a knocking, about merciless submission, about grasping rejection as an opportunity for revision‒ but, to paraphrase Billy Collins, the essay doesn’t end when the author stops writing, it ends when the reader stops reading.

David Bleiman is the author of This Kilt of Many Colours (2021) and Gathering Light (2022)

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Brian Docherty — WHY I WRITE

22/2/2022

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Brian Docherty. author of 'The View from the Villa Delirium'

The question of why I write could mean various things and could be answered in different ways. The simplest answer is ‘because I can’ and ‘because I believe I have something to say that other people might be interested in.’ I am not a musician or visual artist, and do not write prose, apart from academic work back in the day, and occasional reviewing nowadays. My family background is skilled working class - what Americans would understand as blue collar. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, and identify as Glasgow-Irish. I left school at 16, and did various jobs before enrolling on my first degree aged 28. (When I was a teenager, there were still plenty of skilled jobs in the UK, and most people I knew left school at 15; back then university education was for the privileged few.) I moved to London when I was 21.

I started writing poetry in the summer of 1976, and realised immediately that it was awful rubbish;I burnt wodges of that stuff. So I went to Hornsey Library in north London, and started reading English poetry. Philip Larkin was seen as an important poet then, but I read Larkin and thought ‘If that’s a poet, I don’t want to be one.’ I turned my back on English poetry and picked up William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder among others, and started reading in earnest in the Arts Council Poetry Library, then based in Covent Garden, London. By July 1978, I was writing better work, but realised I needed to join a workshop group; that was Camden Voices, run by Dinah Livingstone as an Inner London Education Authority evening class. (ILEA was abolished by Margaret Thatcher, and the old evening class system is long gone). For six years, I was one of many people mentored by Dinah, and I also joined various other groups over the years, notably Vertical Images, Islington Poetry Workshop, and Word for Word, all in north London where I lived for 40 years.

So, if there is such a thing as a typical grassroots poet, that’s me; I publish in magazines, and now eight books, go to readings, attend workshop groups, buy books, and until recently, subscribed to magazines. I carry on because I am still prolific, and I am part of a growing community of writers, artists and musicians in the Hastings area where I have lived for just over six years, as of March 2022. For those of you who haven’t visited the UK, Hastings is 70 miles south of London, on the Sussex coast. Here, I am a member of several writers groups, including Hastings Stanza Group, Shorelink Writers, Words for Wellbeing, and The Literary Shed, and I take part in regular local events in Hastings, Eastbourne, and Brighton. I don’t get up to London very often, two hours on the train on a good day, and I am too old to be getting home at one am. As a grizzled veteran, I can just show up and read my work; I am not involved in organising writing groups or events, as I was in London, but I can still make a contribution.

What I haven’t mentioned is that my wife, Rosemary, and I moved to St. Leonards-on-Sea, next door to Hastings, in October 2015, for what I imagined would be a life of elegant retirement in a quiet seaside town. We were there 11 weeks when Rosemary was taken ill one Saturday morning, and passed away peacefully on the Sunday evening. Be careful what you wish for? As George Harrison put it, ‘life flows on, within you and without you.’ So yes, I carry on writing, and my work over the last 6 years is locally specific and very different to my London writing. Some of it is still the blend of politics, social comment and black humour I was known for in London, but it is only recently that I have started writing more openly ‘personal’ work, including a sequence of memorial poems for Rosemary, Blue to the Edge. In 2017 I published two books, In My Dreams, Again, (Penniless Press), London poems from 2008-13, and Only In St. Leonards: A Year On The Marina (Special Sorts Press). Only in St. Leonards is made up of poems written in 2016 (and early 2017) and is a signed, numbered, limited edition, as a fundraiser for St. Michael’s Hospice in St. Leonards, where I did bereavement counselling in 2017. The View From the Villa Delirium was published by Dempsey & Windle in 2021.

I am blessed to have made new friends in Hastings, and been accepted into the local creative community, and there is one person in particular who was an absolute beacon in the darkness early on who I will not embarrass by naming; more recently Kuan Yin smiled on me and allowed me to meet someone very special. No idea what my future might hold, I get through one day at a time, I write, go to poetry events, art exhibitions, gigs, watch soccer on TV, travel some, anything else is a bonus. Poetry will continue to be at the centre of my life until the day I have to give myself away. I look forward to meeting my friends in Austin, Texas, again for the Austin International Poetry Festival and then meeting more friends in San Francisco after that, and as always, I am grateful for the opportunity to share my work.
BRIAN DOCHERTY, St. Leonards-on-Sea, January 15, 2018, updated February 2022.

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HOW I WRITE by Paul Surman

22/2/2022

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Paul Surman: HOW I WRITE

As I imagine many people do, I write to make sense of the world in my own terms. Among other things, George Orwell spoke of sheer egotism as number one on his list of reasons for writing, and I recognise that in my younger self, but writing has also been redemptive. The more I wrote, the more self critical I became, until eventually, I wrote for the love of writing and the expression of ideas. It should be mentioned that I have Asperger’s and that helps with its tendency to obsession and focus, and writing can turn negative feelings towards a positive outcome.

As to how I write, various things come into play. I don’t have much time for romanticised ideas of inspiration, without the hard work of thinking, and I enjoy thinking. Also I am obsessed with consciousness, what it is and how it feels, and that is often a starting point. I follow things through. Sometimes it is two disparate things I feel there is a tension between, and I try to understand what that means. At other times I see something and feel a tension inside myself, a kind of weather report indicating a poem is coming.

Occasionally a phrase arrives, like a screen grab from my passing thoughts, that can only be eradicated by writing a poem. In my collection to be published in July 2022 there is a poem that started from a line about “me coming in from the rain”. I have no idea where it came from, but a poem came from it. More recently, returning from London, the phrase “walking away across fields” kept passing through my thoughts, and eventually resolved into a poem. There are many ways poems come into being, but in my case they come from a fundamental dissatisfaction, an itch that must be scratched, a picture that must be straightened before I can be satisfied with life again. There must be tension of some kind or the writing will either fail to happen, or be dull and flat. It is an endless task and often exhausting, but it has become a way of life. I wouldn’t care to live life “off the peg” always consuming things other people have made. I have had the great privilege of inventing myself in words, and as far as I am concerned there is nothing more satisfying.

Paul Surman
February 2022
Paul Surman is the author of Seasons of Damage and Beauty and his third poetry collection, The Ghostly Effect, is to be published in July 2022

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WHY I WRITE

Greg Freeman: Why I write

Trisha Broomfield's INSPIRATION

Heather Moulson: Why I write

Why I Write: ALISON MACE

Dennis Tomlinson — Why / How I write

"NOT SEEING THE WOODS FOR THE WORDS" — David Bleiman

Brian Docherty. author of 'The View from the Villa Delirium'

Paul Surman: HOW I WRITE

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