I write poems and reviews – the reviews for pleasure, the poems more as a compulsion. Reviewing a book helps me get to know it properly and if the poet has published other collections, I’ll read those as well to get the context. It’s broadened my appreciation of contemporary poetry, as well as taking me back to my schooldays, when I enjoyed the practical criticism exercises we were set. It was disappointing to find that they didn’t figure much in my university course, which was more historically based. I wouldn’t try the reader’s patience by analysing a poem in full, but learning the discipline has been useful. In a review, I try to provide a flavour of the book, so that people can decide for themselves whether they want to read it. For the same reason, I include a lot of quotations (we were always taught to back up our assertions).
 
I started writing poems in my early teens, but despite some early success (perhaps because of it), I didn’t really get going again until I was in my fifties. It was mainly a lack of confidence: poetry was too important for me to risk failing at it. I tried, off and on, to get things published and even when I was effectively silent, I still planned poems in my head. For me, a life without poetry would be very empty. I see it as a way of capturing something alive. What you do with it once you’ve caught it is up for debate, but a dead poem is no use to anyone. For me, it’s mostly about finding meaning and structure in an increasingly crazy world.
 
I like the concentration needed for any kind of writing and I’m sure that being a practising poet helps me review other people’s poetry, but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. I can see things in my poems after I’ve written them that I might have commented on in a review, but these are post-hoc rationalisations. My critical faculties aren’t engaged when I’m actually writing a poem. I proceed mostly by ‘feel’ and – as people often say – I’m not satisfied unless a poem has surprised me in some way.
 
Stephen Claughton
Stephen 's collection 'The 3-D Clock ' was published by Dempsey & Windle in 2020.

​WHY DO I WRITE?
 
Some people climb mountains because they are there. It is like that with my writing. I write because the words, the raw materials, the building blocks of the imagination are out there waiting. We spend our lives accumulating an enormous reservoir of knowledge and experience and it would seem wasteful not to use it in the best way possible. I write because I can, though I didn’t know I could until I reached 50. I didn’t have time or ability to make time before then.
Writing helps me articulate thoughts and emotions in a way that I sometimes find difficult in speech. By placing emotions into someone else’s persona and voice can help to clarify them and put them into perspective. Writing keeps my brain active and helps me pull into focus my place in the world physically, mentally and spiritually.
I rarely write directly about Parkinson’s but it emerges from time to time in different ways. I don’t like labels and I don’t suffer; if you tell yourself you are suffering it only feeds a victim mentality. I have lived with the condition so far for 24 years, but it has to put up with me too.
Why do I write? Because it has helped to make me the ‘me’ that I am and the ‘me’ that I might become. And if I can put a smile on someone’s face on the journey I will have done a good job.                              
 
The following paragraphs are extracts from my Ars Poetica, written as part of my Open University MA in Creative Writing.
I write because I believe that poetry: can unearth and express the extraordinary in the ordinary and vice versa; can change people, atmosphere, history, attitudes, politics, can give comfort in conflict or disaster, commemorate and witness; is the autobiography of an age, written by ghost-writers, a place and time peopled by imagination, illustrated with vignettes and visions.
I write because I see the poet as: a scavenger of words, phrases and observations, the gull snatching morsels of credibility from amongst the dross of experience; a facilitator, a signpost on a treasure map of many paths, small parcels of metanarrative, that ancient conundrum that fuels philosophers and flummoxes fools.      ©2018, 2022 Julie Anne Gilligan
 
A short version was published in The Hoot. (OUSA online magazine)
https://thehootstudents.com/poems-about-poetry/  
The full version was published in ‘Red Letter Openings’ The OU Poetry Society 40th Anniversary anthology (2021) 

Julie Anne Gilligan is the author of Time Matters (published on Ist June 2022)

I write to stay alive; to try and process this aliveness; to find myself and lose myself; to share with others how being here feels, both the good things and the bad things. Writing at least makes me feel that I have some slender grip on how things are, even if this is transitory and largely a delusion. Sometimes writing is simply a cry of anguish at the cruelty of the human world. But there are also things to celebrate and writing reminders about that is important. The best poem is always the next one to be written.

Colin Pink's writing website is at colinpink.wordpress.com. Dempsey & Windle/Vole published Typicity, his poetry collection, in 2021

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.  ​

When I ask myself why I write I give myself a number of answers. Not all of them are pleasing or satisfactory but they always occur to me so I shall list them. I write:
 
Because I’m better at writing than at anything else. (Discouraged in maths and music I turned to the measures and harmonies of language.)
 
Because my poems are all that I can give to the world. (The world has plenty of poems already.)
 
Because when I feel alone I see writing as a way of connecting with people, making them laugh, cry, empathize. (My writing may be rejected.)
 
Because I’m seeking immortality: when my life is done my poems live on. (But nothing lasts forever.)
 
Because I’m a reader and reading and writing go together. (Sometimes.)
 
Because I want to make worthwhile discoveries about myself and others. (Possible only if I write with
the clear-eyed honesty that distinguishes the thoughts and feelings I really have from those I would like to have or think I should have.)
   
Because by nature I’m more of an observer of life than a participant in it. (If, in my company, you fall and are injured I’ll think of how I’ll describe the incident before I think of how to raise you and staunch the flow of your blood. I’m afraid this is the famous sliver of ice in the heart of the writer.)
 
This last reason may also go some way towards explaining not just my writing but my writer’s block, something I’ve been experiencing since becoming carer to my partner who has an advanced cancer.
 
My block may, of course, be simply due to tiredness and limited energy-levels, but might it not also be that life has taken over from art and observation, and that the sliver of ice has melted? I can’t be sure.
 
Nor can I be sure that this state of my creativity is permanent. One day, perhaps, I may find myself writing the kind of poems which are emotion recollected in tranquility, or exploring life through fictional characters again, like my Headless Man or Ježibaba. Who knows?
 
 
      Janet Loverseed’s poems, Dancing with a Headless Man and Ježibaba are in her collection,
 
      Ježibaba, which was published by Dempsey & Windle in 2020