I cannot imagine not writing. I started at primary school but poetry didn’t really feature at my grammar school. I left school at 16 and it wasn’t until I was in my late 20’s that I became a Punk Poet. I loved it and even though I did a string of self-publishing , pamphlets and a full collection, it was all about the stage. Over the 1980’s/90’s I was performing regularly including theatrical monologues and doing art/poetry collaborations. I owe much to Patric Cunnane from Dodo Modern Poets and artist/ poetry legend Bob Devereux. I haven’t done the theatrical stuff for years but I’ve still got the outfits.
 
When I turned 40 there was a shift and I studied for an English Literature BA. Though I was still a performance poet I read more poetry and studied it and a transition from stage to page began. Reading other poets’ work is so important if you write your own but likewise even if you see yourself as a page poet it’s a bonus if you can read well in public.  After that I started taking The Poetry School classes, which I can recommend. For many years I attended a workshop with Katy Evans-Bush who convinced me that I didn’t need to be an academic to write good poetry, an important turning point for me. I started  getting accepted in more magazines and  had a collection, Hush, published with Morgan’s Eye Press. Since then I have had two pamphlets published: Rented (Palewell Press, 2018) and Track Record (Dempsey and Windle, 2021).
 
I’ve always joked that I’m glad I’m a poet and not a footballer (even though I’d like some of their money) because you’re not washed up at 35. Many poets flourish in later life and my highlight was getting an MA in Writing Poetry, aged 63, with The Poetry School with Newcastle University. This was a wonderful experience, all praise to tutors Tamar Yoseloff and Glyn Maxwell and my fellow students. Which leads me on to another reason to write poems, The Poetry Family. I am still friends with many poets from the performance scene and have made new poetry mates  through my studies; add to that all the wonderful, hardworking small publishers and event organisers. Recently it has been a privilege to work with Poets for the Planet and Poets for Ukraine. I love all of you guys.

Sue Johns' website is at https://www.suejohns.co.uk 

​She is the author of 'Track Record' (2021). 

I was brought up on a diet of poetry and history – plus a good dollop of fairy stories and Greek myths, with a sprinkling of the King James Bible. Later, I had to acquire the less palatable language of management-speak and ‘measurable’ criteria.
 
I’ve written poetry since childhood; but with the demands of career and family I didn’t continue again until retirement. I also then followed up a very amateur interest in particle physics, saluting the readiness of top experts to acknowledge, often in the face of great cosmological questions: ‘We don’t know the answers.’ Such an initially unexpected link with poetry!
 
For that’s one of poetry’s joys: its uncertainty, its links. It’s a spidergram. I can start at the centre with ‘I’ and the family, radiate out to work, interests and the wider world, often unaware that links are developing across the strands. Memory itself is like a prism where the colours change with me as I gain new experiences, age in relation to those I write about or as the present re-assesses the past.
 
How do I think? How do I use language? My choice of subject and way of thinking of course affect my expression; but, more unexpectedly, form and language can affect my thinking, occasionally producing a shift or an ending that’s a surprise to my start. If it works, this can re-set the whole poem, maybe telling me that it’s not about the subject I envisaged after all, maybe creating a totally fresh link, making leaps in thought and language I couldn’t in prose. In writing a poem, always I have to write first drafts in pencil – something about linking hand and mind.
 
I learn so much from hearing others, past and present, gaining from their thinking and their craftsmanship. Why that subject? that form? that metaphor? that line break? How does the poem ‘sing in its chains’? I marvel at the way a fine poem always leaves something of itself behind.
 
So I write to discover, better to appreciate the best in doing so. I’m in thrall to poetry’s precision, its ambivalence, its over-and-aboveness; its ability to speak truth to power or engage in music or humour; to identify with Nature; to help me meet myself and those I love in all those spaces between laughter and loss, hurt and hope. To me, poetry is fellowship, work and play in one.
 
Belinda Singleton is the co-author of Wavelengths (2019) and the author of Foxes Don't Wear Watches.  ​