DENNIS TOMLINSON

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)