What can you tell us about your Issue Three poems?

Grocery shopping with a woman from Hinge very much does what it says on the tin. It was a while ago, maybe a year? I’d gone on a few dates with someone I’d met at Goldie Saloon—I took artistic liberty with the “from Hinge” based on a conversation we’d had. But yeah, we decided to have a chill evening in, went to Tesco and got some girl dinner, as described. Sadly, it didn’t pan out. I’m dating-app sober but I often think it might be worth it for the material.

I quite like is a really lovely memory of my friend John and I. My poetry stanza organised our own retreat in Avignon with Rachel Long, with the plan being for a couple of people to pair off and cook dinner for the whole group each evening.

John and I made many mediocre things, but started with devilled eggs as a little appetiser. I set him the task of making sure the eggs were hard boiled. He tried to take them off the hob 5 minutes early and I was like, “they’re not done,” and he was like “they are,” and I was like “just to be clear, this is the hill you want to die on?” and he was like “yes.” The eggs were not done.

Tomatoes were also sliced.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

There are so many household name poets I love—Frank O’Hara (all of it, but especially To the Harbormaster, which Google tells me I visit often), Tomas Tranströmer (The Couple and After Someone’s Death), Emily Berry (Love Bird and Dream of a Dog1)—to name a few.

But I take just as much from my friends and contemporaries as I do established writers. Rich Ware writes about the contemporary queer experience with such reverence and empathy, Tangerine is a great example of this, as is Swallows, which I’m not sure has been published yet. (Rich, if you’re reading this, please advise).

John Wildsmith’s (soft boiled egg, see above) poems are almost orienting for me. I read them, and I remember what I’m doing it for. His poem Going Church is one of my favourite poems.

Though I wish he’d stop editing the first stanza.

Phoebe Gilmore’s remind me of whipped cream—they’re so light and airy on the surface but are deceptively heavy and could probably clog your arteries (in the best way). The best example of this is her as-of-yet released meme series which is so soft, really incredible..

Carol Peace (who is also an established sculptor) is so unashamedly herself in everything she does, especially in how she writes. She reminds me to not take myself so seriously. “I know it’s pretty cliché, but maybe I can get away with it because it’s me (laughing emoji).” She self published her own, stunning, collection, a testament to her “fuck it, I’ll do it myself” attitude.

Stevie Green has this poem about his school friend kicking a bin in frustration that’s hilarious, and tender and nostalgic. And he just randomly dashed one off the other day, the sugarbabes are back. He reminds me of Frank O’Hara like that. He writes memory like I wish I could.

I don’t know him personally, but I also loved Tom Bailey’s pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, the lines “It’s so sad when someone dies. They take all of their thoughts with them.” is, in my opinion, the perfect couplet.

What drew you to writing poetry?

Ben Lerner, no contest. I picked up No Art, which includes his pamphlet The Lichtberg Figures, by chance in Waterstones in November 2023. I was immediately, completely obsessed. I think I sent everyone I knew the first poem in the pamphlet, beginning the dark collects our empties. The last line is a killer.

Cut to a month or so later, I had too much prosecco on Boxing Day and signed up to the beginner Faber poetry course, which started three weeks later, with Richard Scott and Rachel Long. It was a Christmas gift to myself, having written maybe 3 ½ “poems” in the month preceding. Everything stemmed from those 12 weeks. Kind of wild to think about.

What’s your first poetry memory?

Sitting in that Faber course on the first day, Richard (Scott) had everyone describe their favourite colour as an intro. Rich (Ware) talked about his burnt orange couch, another girl her bottle-green nail polish. I think I prattled on about some abandoned tattoo concept with a marigold.

What’s on your bedside table? What books, trinkets…?

Right now, Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara (emotional support copy), Goodlord by Ella Frears2, and a Folio Society print edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. My dad’s panama hat, a photo of us at the zoo when I was a kid, La Roche-Posay sunblock, mascara, and two cans of black beans I picked up from the off license, took out of my tote and have yet to take to the kitchen.

What’s your favourite text about the sea? Or beaches?

To the Harbormaster, Frank O’Hara. Only because I, too, am always tying up and then deciding to depart.

What can you tell us about The Prophecy and the Lawnmower?

My poem The prophecy and the lawnmower is one of a number of poems that I’ve written about my relationships with men. The afternoon mentioned in the poem happened several years ago, but that day has remained with me ever since because it highlighted for me the difference between societal expectations regarding marriage/monogamy, and the way that I have chosen to live my life—I am openly polyamorous and bisexual. My neighbour really was obsessively mowing his lawn that day and I could really hear him, so, in this poem, I wanted to suggest the luxuriousness of (sexual) openness vis a vis the restraints or ‘straightness’ of most peoples’ lives. The idyllic English lawn and a man fixated with keeping it perfect seemed a fitting image.

The poem was incredibly difficult to craft. The idea to use the future tense came from Andrew McMillan's poem, Finally, in which he uses the future tense to hint at the repetition of relationships. So, while my poem refers to a specific day, the use of ‘will’ makes the event more universal, I hope.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I am very much influenced by poets who are able to approach the subject of sex openly. This includes, of course, Kim Moore and Andrew McMillan (both tutors of mine at MMU) but also many American poets including Kim Addonizio and Olivia Gatwood.

I am extremely taken by the way that Sean Hewitt is able to approach sensuality.

Furthermore, Mancunian poet, Carson Wolfe, a classmate from MMU, has also influenced the way that I approach writing about sex—their pared-back style and honesty on the page have been majorly informative in my writing.

Finally, Bad Betty-published poet, Jemima Foxtrot, has also been influential in my work. The way that Jemima speaks about sex work, for example, is empowering.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I always write hand-written notes first in erasable black ink whenever I can, and transfer it to a laptop when it seems to carry some hope. Unfortunately, I can't write poems in permanent ink, so I always make sure I have a whole pencil case full of erasable pens of all colours.

Everywhere I go I carry a pencil case, plus the latest book I’m reading, plus two A4 spiral-bound notebooks. One notebook is labelled ‘words from other poets’ (in which I jot lines, words, adjectives, similes etc that have resonated), and one is labelled, ‘drafts and ideas’. Of necessity, I have a large backpack.

Do you write in other forms?

I am a playwright and also a flash-fiction-writer. However, poetry is my first love, and I only dabble in other written forms when my poetry is safely ‘stashed away’ and everything I want to write is up to date.

What drew you to writing poetry?

I was in a 20-year-long abusive relationship. At night I’d put my kids to bed, with stories and fairytales and laughter, but once their doors were closed, my reality was very different. So, in 2017, I began a 6-year Open University degree (general arts) to help me through the loneliness and abuse of the evenings.

Of everything that I studied over the years at the OU, there was one single unit on creative writing, and the assignment was to write either 12 lines of poetry or a couple of pages of prose ... and I thought (in my innocence) that 12 lines of poetry was easier, and that was it! I was struck by the poetry bug... This was in 2021, and by 2022, I had left my job and I was signed up for a creative writing course at my local university (Derby). I now have a BA from Derby (first-class), an MA in poetry (distinction) from MMU, and I start my PhD in October!!

What’s your first poetry memory?

I was 12/13, and I submitted a hand-written poem to the editorial of my local newspaper about how it felt to be an adolescent. It was published. My teachers were in awe, and my classmates hated me.

What’s on your bedside table? Books etc.?

I’m currently re-reading Goodlord by Ella Frears, Eleanor among the Saints by Rachel Mann, and there is always a something by Sean Hewitt on my bedside table, too. I’m also listening to Before War—On Marriage, hierarchy, and matriarchal origins on Audible by Elisha Daeva who explains in detail about how polyamory is the natural default.

What one image do you want to send that speaks to your poem?

A reproduction of this painting by Peder Severin Krøyer, has been in various walls (sometimes bathroom, sometimes kitchen, sometimes bedroom) throughout my life. For me, it perfectly epitomises the constraints of public life, and the sensuality of private life.

What can you tell us about Bruise like the face of Jesus?

I wrote this poem a few weeks after I fainted at a Boxing Day dinner party. It was my first time fainting – a new experience to explore poetically. A bruise developed on my inner thigh which vaguely looked like the face of Jesus. I was interested in the way the body carries marks – the bloodwork of a fall.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I’m currently in the final push of completing my MA at Goldsmiths University of London and have been revisiting a lot of older work by Rachael Allen, particularly her 4chan poems in her pamphlet Faber New Poets 9. Rapidshares /r/ remains a favourite of mine. Allen is so skilled in capturing a certain kind of girlhood nostalgia in this poem. My project for my MA is exploring the similarity between the culture of memes and poetry.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I usually write lines in the Google Docs app on my phone so that I can develop it straight away when I have some quiet laptop time. It’s turned into a bit of chaos recently as I’ve found that Google Docs is rubbish and I’m trying to transfer over to Word documents — I’m now dealing with two graveyards of drafts instead of one.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Dream of a dog by Emily Berry. I read that poem again and again and always find something new and delicate in it.

Tell us what’s on your bedside table?

Paracetamol, contraceptive pill, water bottle, jewellery and Cat Bohannan’s Eve: How the female body drove 200 million years of evolution (it is a huge book, I have only read three chapters of it, but I have really enjoyed it so far).

What song helps us get to know you better?

This question is a lot of pressure, so I have just gone to my liked songs on Spotify and the most recent one I have saved is Fame is a Gun by Addison Rae – a great tune for getting ready, which is universally the best part of a night out.

What can you tell us about your two Issue Three poems?

Both of these poems came from my desire to explore and retell the Welsh myth of Gelert and Llywelyn. Long story short — a prince, Llywelyn, loves his dog Gelert. One day, Llywelyn thinks Gelert has killed his child, so he kills Gelert. He is wrong. Gelert was only protecting the child. This story was told to me when I was at school by my teacher and it fascinated me — the relationship with the dog, the bloody scene in the nursery and the way Llywelyn was so quick to believe the worst in his friend. I set out to write about this and thought about bell hooks’ quote: ‘The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.’ So, this was my focus. I was thinking of Llywelyn as going through the stages of psychic self-mutilation, killing off his emotional self due to becoming the King of Wales (a fantasy I wanted to indulge as we never had this in history).

By the time we meet Llywelyn in these poems, he has changed. In Deganwy Castle — a poem I wrote when I was in Berlin — he is reflecting on a time when he was innocent but used violence to communicate his strength to other boys. It is a mirror for the man he is now, destroying castles and homes because he believes that is power. And of course it is not. This is why he meets Cythraul in the next poem. He has become a tyrant, and all tyrants meet their ends. Cythraul is the Welsh word for Satan or Devil. Llywelyn’s self-mutilation has led him to this and who is waiting for him? Who is the person he really wants to see? Gelert. The best friend he killed. Llywelyn’s tale was always told to me as a tragedy, so I wanted to expand on that and give it a modern lens. To see Llywelyn as the kind of man who kills the only person who could have saved him.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Lucille Clifton is my guiding light, my joy and my inspiration. Her range, skill and storytelling abilities are just perfection. I always go back to her poems about the Bible and the angel reporting on Adam and Eve; sublime. Eileen Myles is another that frees me from the shackles of rules and just tells me to write. The phenomenal Louise Glück, such wondrous precision of words and thoughts. I’m very much a product of the authors I love and when I’m writing poetry, I am constantly reading it, I’m insatiable. I was fortunate enough to be at a writing residency at Moniack Mhor when I was working on most of these poems (as I’m hoping this will be my second book) and I devoured their poetry library. It’s like a beat that needs to keep moving in my head and that can only happen with others’ words.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I work full-time as a language teacher, so I work at night. After dinner and some film or TV time, my partner goes to bed, and I go to the laptop for a few hours. If I’m writing poetry, I start with a pen and paper, I can scribble in the margins, move lines around, hash out ideas. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t, and I need to come back to it. I’m a big believer in not forcing it but also being disciplined — it’s a fine middle line to strike, knowing when to walk away, knowing when to stay and push on. I’ll type the poem up when it’s somewhat finished on the page and by typing I am putting it through its first draft. Some poems take about thirteen drafts, others just come as they are. I struggled a lot with Deganwy Castle but when I realised the shape of the poem, it fell into place. Shape is really important to me. I don’t really know why but I need to understand the arch of the poem, the way the lines sit together, how it looks. Cythraul was the opposite. I knew its shape, I knew its message and it just burst out of me. My beautiful, dead, tyrant shouting for his best friend.

What drew you to writing poetry?

Philip Gross. When I was at the University of South Wales (what was known as the University of Glamorgan when I was there), Philip ran a Children’s Writing course which I took. Part of that was writing poetry which I decided to have a go at. I’d not written poetry before. I’d been writing short stories and novels throughout my teens but was scared of poetry due to its rules. It was Philip and another tutor, Barrie Llywelyn, who taught me to throw the rules out and just write. I’ve written about the elitism of poetry, the way it can alienate instead of attract but as I’ve experienced more poetry — especially modern poetry — I have realised it is a vessel to communicate anything we want. It can be free of form but also adhere to a form. Its strength is its creation and obliteration of rules.

Sandra Bullock Lost In Space

The Power of Poetry

My university tutor said to me once, ‘a poem is a poem because the poet says it is’. In that simple declarative sentence a wall that had been built many years before fell down. I heard the mortar crumble, the bricks collide, the dirt spew out. And I felt excited. Poetry, without rules. What a new concept…

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10 months ago · 2 likes · Thomas Stewart

What’s on your bedside table? Books etc.?

I always have way too many books on my to-read pile, but this brings me joy as I never know what mood I’m going to be in. I’ve just finished Boy Parts by Eliza Clark which was gnarly and wonderful. Also The Difficult Ghost by Leila Guerriero, a story of how Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood. I’m reading a lot of fiction at the moment, as that’s what I’m primarily writing, although I may have just started a new poetry project, we shall see. I have Christos Tsiolkas’ The In-Between (I love Tsiolkas’ style of writing). Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence. The Italian by Ann Radcliff. The War Between the Tates by Alison Lurie. Bunny by Mona Awad. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector which was a gift from one of my students. Marlon James’ Black Leopard Red Wolf. In terms of poetry, I have Danez Smith’s Bluff (Smith is one of my favourite living poets) and Diane Seuss’ Modern Poetry (excited for that as I thought frank: sonnets was a thing of genius). Oh, and a biography of Stanley Kubrick.

What can you tell us about None of my friends want to talk about heaven?

I started writing it in a bookshop cafe where I’d picked up a copy of Kaveh Akbar’s collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf. This was one of the first poetry collections I read from start to finish when I’d just started writing poetry. Lent by a friend, the book found me at the right time just as it re-found me at the right time again.

One of my all time favourite poems is Aquí te amo (Here I love you) by Pablo Neruda - specifically the line a veces amanezco, y hasta mi alma está húmeda (sometimes I wake up and even my soul is wet). To me, Neruda’s wet soul image inadvertently captures the helplessness and surrender that Akbar explores in his writing around addiction and recovery, something which I’d been searching for a language for in my own work.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Sarah Ruhl is a poet and playwright I find myself in dialogue with often. The way she talks to God or Gods in her work revolutionised how I think about how poetry connects us with something larger than ourselves, whether or not we keep a religious or spiritual practice elsewhere in our lives.

Hera Lindsay Bird, Eileen Myles, Kim Addonizio and Rachael Allen are some poets I find my poems talking to lots at the moment. Lifelong chats with Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds and Frank O’Hara as much as Fiona Apple, Frank Ocean and Brittany Howard.

Apart from the above, this particular poem’s internet-pilled register is very much a delayed response to Sheena Patel’s novel I’m a Fan, which floored me when I read it and has stayed lodged in my brain the three years since.

Do you write in other forms? If so, how do you toggle between them?

I write for theatre a lot, but I don’t see playwriting as a necessarily separate practice to writing poetry. Often I’ll have the seed of an idea and try it out in a few different forms to see what works best, toggling between dialogue, monologue, something more poetic or descriptive or abstract. Sometimes I’ll spend months inside a play, not writing any poetry at all, but then occasionally I’ll spend months on poems, not writing any plays.

Playwriting is a longer process because it’s generally a longer form; by virtue of this there are more formal and structural conventions which you sort of need to lean on if you want to sustain an audience's attention for a whole evening. Without some kind of robust structure this would be really, really hard to do. I’m thinking less about structure when I write poetry, or perhaps thinking about it differently, but with both forms in different ways, I’m thinking about atmosphere and rhythm.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

On days I’m not working my day job, I typically make a coffee and then sit down to free-write in a notebook first thing in the morning, for about 10 minutes. Then I’ll open the laptop, look over what I’ve done the previous day and edit for a bit. Sometimes I have a plan of what I’m going to write for the rest of the day but more often I’m channeling half-formed ideas into messy first drafts. Most things don’t make it past that stage but if something’s sticking I’ll keep going with it. In the afternoon I usually read a play. In the evening if I don’t have plans I’ll try and write more. If I get stuck I’ll go for a walk and that usually dislodges something, as does seeing a friend or watching a film or taking a shower. On day job days, I write on my commute.

What one image do you want to send that speaks to your poem?

Ana Mendieta’s Imagen de Yagul, from her Silueta Series. I love Mendieta’s art and what she says about it being a way of reconnecting her body with the universe. Her work across sculpture, painting, video and performance channels something vital about the body and nature; temporal displacement and the conditions under which women live. These are themes I try to reckon with through language and performance, in my own work.

In 1985 Mendieta fell to her death from the window of the 34th floor apartment in Greenwich Village she shared with her husband, the poet and sculptor Carl Andre. She was wearing only her underwear. Neighbours had heard the couple arguing and Andre was charged, but later acquitted, of Mendieta’s murder. She was 36.

What can you tell us about this poem?

This poem started as an exercise for a class at the Writers Studio. Each week, we analyze a model poem and then write an exercise using the craft of the model but with our own material. The model for the exercise that became this poem was Jack Gilbert’s “Elegy for Bob” from his collection Refusing Heaven. I was intimidated because Gilbert unspooled huge emotions with such honesty. I started with a close trace to figure it out. My breakthrough was seeing how he stitched together short evocative scenes to heighten both love and grief. That helped me also figure out how I needed to break from his poem to get to mine.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I remember reading Chen Chen for the first time and marveling at how poems could be wickedly fun (see: “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party”). I also remember listening to Solmaz Sharif read “Social Skills Training” and holding my breath through the entire thing. I’m still trying on different styles and figuring out who I am as a writer, but I want to evoke the emotional connection that I got from Chen and Sharif as well as many others. There’s something to learn from every poet I come across, and I’m elated that I get to write alongside their work.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I write on weekend mornings because there are fewer distractions—my husband and most of my friends are not morning people. I write by hand to come up with ideas and switch to the computer when I feel like I have material to work with. I enjoy writing to music. Lately, it’s been the cast recording of Maybe Happy Ending or Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi, The New Four Seasons. But the most important thing for me is my writing community. Through taking and teaching classes with the Writers Studio, I’ve found a community of supportive, dedicated writers. I also made a few poet friends I’m exchanging work with! It’s much harder to procrastinate when they’re expecting a draft of something. And once they’ve given me generous, perceptive feedback, I don’t want their work to go to waste, so it pushes me to revise things in a timely manner too.

What drew you to write poetry?

I wish I could say it’s because of a poet I really admired or because poetry creates new possibility for language or something else aspirational. I went to poetry because I can’t fathom writing anything long. Not that poems are easy for me. It’s daunting to arrange a small number of words so that they project a big idea, emotion, or paradox in a layered and beautiful way. But I’d rather try that than attempt a short story.I have a good friend who’s a fiction writer, and I’ve always wondered how she does it. She enjoys writing prose so much that it pushed me to face my fears. I’ve started dabbling in flash (fiction and creative nonfiction). Maybe one day, I’ll write something longer than 750 words.

What song helps us get to know you better?

Andromeda by Ryan Beatty.

What’s on your bedside table? Books, etc?

I just finished Blackouts by Justin Torres, so that’s there along with Severance by Ling Ma, The Tradition by Jericho Brown, and The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket by Kinsale Drake. My husband also crocheted me a little basket to hold various knickknacks. Somehow, that discourages our cat from knocking things off.

What is your favourite text about the sea?

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

Stephen K. Kim’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Fifth Wheel Press, and elsewhere. He can be found online @skimperil.

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What can you tell us about this poem?

What If I Told You That is part of a series of poems I’m working on that take their titles from prompts on the dating app Hinge. I’m interested in how answering these prompts ‘poetically’ or within the form of a poem can complement or contrast to the ways users of the app might answer them. At the same time, I’m fascinated by the ways we curate digital selves and present them to the world, how layered these seemingly trivial or ‘quick’ (read: laboured over!) responses can be.

I’m also interested in what I see as the surprising similarities between digital mediums of written language (be it a WhatsApp message, dating app bio, or even a work email) and poems. In both cases, we often have concise, thought-out combinations of words that say one thing on the surface while multiple other meanings or feelings simmer underneath. In What If I Told You That, I wanted to play with a speaker who both reveals and conceals a frankness and sense of vulnerability. In this way, I also consider What If I Told You That to be somewhat adjacent to or in conversation with my poem No Worries If Not :) published in Issue 13 of fourteen poems, for the ways it presents a joviality on the surface to mask sensitivity underneath.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

It feels wildly audacious to say, but Emily Dickinson. I remember reading her poems as an undergrad and thinking: “wow, poems can do that?!” She is the queen of ambiguity and layering multiple meanings in almost every single word of a poem. I love how she substitutes word classes and uses familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Her poems on the page may appear small in stature, but they are mighty in what they manage to contain, what spills out when we read and re-read them. Although I know I’ll never get close to being able to write like Dickinson (who could?!), I also know I carry her influence with me whenever I write. Or maybe this is just an excuse for having a penchant for writing short-form poems ha!

Oh, and some contemporary poets and collections that I’ve been reading and obsessing over lately are: Danez Smith’s Bluff, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining, Richard Scott’s That Broke into Shining Crystals, Elisabeth Sennitt Clough’s My Name is Abilene, and Maria Ferguson’s Swell.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

Pretty much every poem I’ve ever written starts its life through writing by hand. For me, I need that tangibility. Writing can all too easily be attributed to the mind and thought, to the cerebral, but in starting with my hand moving across a physical page I am reminded (unconsciously) that writing also lives in the body. I once attended a (life-changing!) workshop led by the brilliant CAConrad who spoke about the importance of writing in cursive. They spoke about how cursive writing is freedom – it gifts us the ability to write at the speed of our thoughts and therefore to break away from internal editors.

Once I have something down in my notebook, I’ll transition to typing on my laptop. Moving from gripping a pen to typing with my fingertips is like a signal to my brain that we’re shifting gears, moving from a purely generative state to one of revision. From writing to re-writing. This often happens in the same sitting as the initial writing by hand. I like the first pass of edits to occur within the headspace that initiated it, if possible. How long I stick at edits varies wildly. Sometimes, I’ll get that brilliant hyper-attentive feeling which makes it impossible to look away from the poem and what it is trying to say. Other times, I know I need to give the words time to breathe and so I leave them to percolate without me, while I percolate without them.

What’s your first poetry memory?

I was actually quite late to leap in love with poetry. It’s something I’m sad about and to be honest a little resentful of… it’s such a big part of my life now that I can’t help but think about the lost time! My first poetry memories are from reading poetry at a young age in school and being so self-conscious when trying to express what I thought. The poems we were studying often didn’t resonate with me or at least not in the way they were being taught. There was that feeling of pressure to get it ‘right’, which I know isn’t uncommon. Now I really enjoy introducing people who don’t often read poetry to poems I think will speak to them or running poetry workshops with people who have never tried to write poems before. It’s so rewarding to see people light up as they connect with poetry for first time.

What song helps us get to know you better?

My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski. The way Mitski’s songwriting holds the big and the small, the intimate and the cosmic, the personally immediate and the publicly historic, together (often in the same breath!) with such ease is so satisfying to me. It’s also something that’s characteristic in many of my favourite poems. How good it feels ­– or rather how seen I feel – to shout: “My body’s made of crushed little stars and I’m not doing anything” or “I better ace that interview / I should tell them that I’m not afraid to die!”

Hetty’s debut pamphlet Inhabit is published by 14poems and is available to buy online now.

Listen to Josh read his Issue Two poem “Being Beautiful Is Not Enough”

What can you tell us about this poem?

I wrote this when I was going through a period of not particularly liking myself, during a summer heatwave where I felt overbearingly aware of my body — sweat, clothes sticking — and also the city in the heat, hot concrete. I was struggling to sleep in the evenings due to the heat and how early the sun rises in summer and floods the house. I was also grieving the end of a friendship and not communicating with anyone about how I was feeling. The poem especially the considers the space between disconnect and hyperawareness.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Dean Young, Richard Scott, Richard Siken, (Meanwhile), Dennis Cooper (After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade).

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

With poetry, I usually start off with writing observations, thoughts, scraps of text in my phone Notes. It isn't until I have the bones of a poem that I transfer it to my laptop, which gives more space to the poem and helps with understanding the formatting of the text.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Romanticism 101 by Dean Young.

Do you write in other forms? If so, how do you toggle between them?

I write mainly short fiction, but also mess around with collage and film cameras. My approach is visual and instinctual — I prefer to allow the idea to pull me along and see where it goes rather than plan. But also, poetry feels more reflexive — I'm responding to the world and my own thoughts & feelings in real time, while I actually sit down and work at prose. I'm not saying prose is more considered, but I sit down at my desk to write prose, while, like photography, I'm out in the world writing poetry.

What’s on your bedside table?

The new Catherine Lacey book, Issue 2 of Left Cultures, a lime & eucalyptus candle, a lamp with a bendy neck, a Praktica TL58 film camera.

What song helps us get to know you better?

What can you tell us about these poems?

I am not entirely sure where or when I first heard the expression “spark bird”, but I recall immediately thinking that there was a lot of poetry potential in those two words, so I went on to do some further research. One of the documents I came across was this blog (mentioned in the poem) where birders shared their “spark bird experience”. The first few entries were, coincidentally, all by male birdwatchers. In fact, the first entry I read contained almost the same line as the first line of the poem: “It was a male dancing on the dunes of Ocean City, New Jersey”. That got me started. The more I was digging into the stories of those birdwatchers and their first “bird-crushes”, the more I could draw a parallel to our experience as gay people in terms of sexual discovery and education, both as young boys and adults. Differently from straight people, we are not taught how sex should work, how relationships should work, or what rules apply in the context of our intimacies. We need to go out there and find out for ourselves. In that, we approach desire and longing unchecked, unsupervised. We step into the woods at dusk, whether metaphorical or otherwise. And the poem attempts to explore that.

Harvest Scenery… really kicked off after listening to an episode of the insightful, funny, outrageous and joyously queer poetry podcast that is Breaking Form. That's when I was introduced to Essex Hemphill's work, specifically the poem Commitments. Commitments dwells on family dynamics in relation to queer identity by describing family gatherings so rich with home-made food as they are with unfulfilled expectations. The settings reminded me of my own family gatherings as a child, and especially of the years as a teenager when I would go and visit my best friend’s vineyard and help with the harvest of grapes, after which a glorious lunch would follow, attended by family members of all ages. There is a verse in Commitments that stuck out for me:

In the photos
the smallest children
are held by their parents.
My arms are empty

It is a very simple and brutal thought I had had myself many times growing up. It made me think of a similar verse I wrote years ago in a poem that was trying to reflect on those days of harvest, unsuccessfully. Hemphill’s poem really gave me an entry point to dig deeper into the subject. That is also why the shape of the poem flirts with Hemphill’s, and some details are borrowed, such as hinting at the speaker's arms and at the presence of a specific photograph. In Commitments, the photographs are mainly used as a premise to allow the speaker to expand on his experience, while, in mine, I wanted the family photograph to work as some sort of volta so that the reader for the majority of the poem is made to believe that they are shown the actual scenery through the eyes of the speaker, in real time, but, in fact, they are witnessing what the speaker is reminiscing; a take on reality. The space that we cannot see in the photograph is to me a place of admission in which the speaker struggles between a sense of affection (I really hope that affection comes through!) and a new understanding of specific physical objects, such as the white vests, the gold chains or the Tupperware. What I like about this poem, when I re-read it, is that I am left with a feeling that the speaker hasn't made up his mind yet. He is still out there looking at what is not in the photograph. Gathering evidence.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I have been reading an unhealthy amount of Carl Phillips (is there such a thing?) in the last few months. I wasn’t aware of his work, and now I am completely in love with the way his poems move on the page. Also, it really interests me the way in which he observes queer relationships and loneliness. Some of my favourites are Neon or Blizzard from Silverchest and Surfers from his latest collection Scattered snows, to the north.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

I usually write during my morning jog. Okay, that doesn't make much sense. Let me articulate this thought. I go for long morning runs every day (about two hours), and that is the time in which I churn all that I have been in conversation with into a poem, if the poem is willing to manifest itself. All drafts, first and subsequent, are composed this way: I repeat to myself every line of the poem as I do my laps in the park or along the Southbank, thinking of changes in language, form and possible line breaks. By the time I am home, I have the poem (or the draft of a poem) learnt by heart. Only then do I proceed to type it on my laptop. I allow myself minor edits sitting at the kitchen table, but the big decisions are made during the run.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Years ago, for a whole winter, I wanted to write like Frank O’Hara, then spring came and I wanted to write like August Kleinzahler! That’s the beauty of finding one's own voice: slowly you understand you can only have your own. I am grateful for the poems that deeply impacted me on my journey as a poet. I don’t wish to have written any of them: they would be different poems if I had done! I am glad there was someone else writing them for me so that I could find them, savour them and study them. I can only wish that, one day, a poem of mine will be as useful and inspiring for another individual as those have been for me.

Five poems that have stayed with me:

Matthew Dickman’s Grief because a poet that has the imaginative genius to start a poem by saying “When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla / you must count yourself lucky” should have a national day where people read and discuss his work and his work only.

Kaveh Akbar's Reza's restaurant, Chicago 1997. A moving piece that deals with race, identity and migration through the eyes of a son looking at his father. I love poems with a restaurant setting.

Allen Ginsberg’s A supermarket in California, which taught me I had queer ancestors living and breathing in poetry books when I thought I was alone.

Philip Levine's The Mercy, the first poem I cried to. Not the last.

Jack Underwood’s Your Horse, which I read and re-read wide eyed, unaware that such things could be done in a poem.

What’s your first poetry memory?

I remember being given my grandfather’s WWII journal from the time he had been detained by the Nazis and brought to Poland, I believe, after Italy signed the Armistice with the Allies. Possibly not the fittest read for a twelve-year-old, but I recall being strongly affected by it in a positive way. So much so that during a test in school, I drifted off and started writing about it. At the end of the test, I showed whatever I had written to my teacher and she looked at me and said: “This is a poem” to which I replied “Where can I find others?”.

What’s on your bedside table? Books, etc?

There is a lot of random shit, things I have got on different trips, notes, pictures. It looks more like an altar of some sort. But there are also books somewhere, I promise.

At the moment, I keep a copy of each of the latest issues of Poetry London, fourteen poems and Poetry, Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, Carl Phillips’ Then the War and a Selected Poems by John Ashberry a dear friend got me for my birthday.

You can read Jack’s poems “Ode to Yu-Gi-Oh” and “11,000 bottles wash ashore with messages from the virgin followers of Saint Ursula of Cornwall”, and listen to Jack read them himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about these poems?

Both poems speak to my relationship with Catholicism, which becomes less complicated with each passing year. The bog standard traumas of going to Catholic school as a closeted child have been successfully self-mythologised and as an atheist I can now straight-forwardly enjoy the rich mythologies, histories, and artworks of Catholicism. I’m particularly in love with the hagiography of Saint Ursula of Cornwall, who was canonised in the 12th century. It tells you so much about medieval and papal thinking, but that aside, it's just such a strange and powerful story.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with? Send links if possible.

There are five writers and one epic poem that have completely changed my approach to writing poetry. Mary Jean Chan was the first, with 2017's The Window. I don't recognise myself in what I was writing before The Window shocked me into developing my own voice. In 2018, I had an absurdly transformative trip to Waterstones, where Han Kang's Human Acts and Stephen Mitchells’ translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh caught my eye. Both inspired me to explore character and narrative in my poems, since my natural tendency is to write about the nonhuman and impersonal. Together with Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Human Acts and the Epic of Gilgamesh are my constant references, inspirations, and companions. I always take at least one of them with me on holiday to reread. And I owe a lot to Selima Hill and Ellora Sutton for the evolution of my poetry's form and language. They always think to do something no one’s done before and always commit to the bit.

What is your writing practice?

I will never write by hand: no copy-and-paste! For the past seven years, anytime I come across a word or phrase or fragment that speaks to me, I add it to an ever-growing Google Doc (currently at 18 pages). When I get an idea for a poem or find a themed submission call I’d like to write for, I go through the entire document and consider how each word, phrase, and fragment I’ve stored could be brought into the poem. This usually gives me two pages of notes to start writing from, which avoids any blank page syndrome. By the time I’ve finished the poem, it’s usually the case that nothing from the ever-growing Google Doc survived to the final draft: which is why it’s ever-growing!

Do you write in other forms, for instance prose? How do you toggle between them?

I work in science communications, so in a typical day I could be writing reports, interview questions, press releases, podcast scripts, ad copy, socials copy... I actually can’t toggle between this and writing poetry. If I’m writing a lot for work, I can’t write poetry. This is something I miss about laboratory research! Often it’d be quite manual, conducting experiments by hand for a few days in a row without even writing an email. I found that a really productive time for my writing, since I could draft poems in my head while floating about the lab bench. I’ve started writing short stories this year and hope that soon I can say I’ve started writing a sci-fi novel...

What’s your first poetry memory?

Performing a slam poem about the villains of SpongeBob Squarepants for a class project when I was 10.

What’s your favourite text about the sea? Or beaches?

The Scar by China Miéville.

What song helps us get to know you better?

One Last Kiss by Hikaru Utada.

Hikaru Utada is one of the few artists my boyfriend and I both like. One Last Kiss is our song.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

Portrait of My Lover in a Car by Selima Hill.

You can read Nathan’s poem “Soy Boy”, and listen to Nathan it himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

Soy Boy, for me, is in conversation with Judith Butler’s notions of gender and sexuality as performance. You know, the whole: it’s not being straight that causes one to act straight; instead, it’s all the ways you act that add up to this idea of straight or masculine or whatever label we’re talking about. The ideas of masculinity, femininity, straight, gay... It’s all an imitation of itself.

So, if it’s all simply an imitation of itself, where is its beginning? If masculinity is a copy, it’s only a copy of a copy. Where is the original? If it’s all a performance, as Butler tells us, do we not just end up with some obscure, camp adaptation of it that’s lost its roots? That’s what I really wanted to explore with Soy Boy.

We’re all human. But somehow, that’s never enough. We feel this need to slap labels on ourselves. And even more so on each other. Why is that? Who determines it? Is there a “good” version and a “bad” version? Like “good” masculinity, for example. What does that even look like? Empathetic? Understanding? Crying? Are these not just attributes to being a “good” human being?

As you can see, there’s a lot of questions - and that’s kind of the point with Soy Boy. In the end, Soy Boy is my way of wrestling with all of these juxtaposing ideas of masculinity, the performance of it, and the strange ways in which we try to define it.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Andrew McMillan and Ocean Vuong have my heart, collectively. The way they both dissect and interrogate themes of queerness, masculinity, and heritage with so much attention to detail. The way they both play with and manipulate language, making words bend to their will so effortlessly. Read Vuong’s essay on Reimagining Masculinity and you’ll know exactly what I mean. In this, he makes reference to one of my favourite poems, Old Glory, which does a delicious job of interrogating language and masculinity. The poem pops in your mouth as you read it. They’ve both probably single-handedly informed my writing the most. Some of my favourite poems include Thanksgiving 2006, Telemachus, and Notebook Fragments by Vuong, as well as Playtime and Personal Trainer by McMillan.

Do you write in other forms? How do you toggle between them?

I dabble in this and that. I love fiction that reads as poetry, screenwriting as vivid as prose, the kind of writing that slips between forms and genres. My wonderful friend Georgia once wrote a stage play adaptation of Wendy Cope’s The Orange and it was genius. That kind of vibe. Mostly I write something, somewhere, between prose and poetry. When it comes to my writing, whether it takes up half a page or several pages, it’s usually all the same to me. Not something I toggle between. I think Ocean Vuong is a great example of this in action, and you’ll know what I mean if you read his collection Time is a Mother and see how his longer poems blend poetry and flash fiction so delicately.

What's on your bedside table?

A big stack of my most recent reads (because they don’t fit on my bookshelf), including The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, Pond by Claire Louise Bennett, and my current read The Vegetarian by Han Kang.

What's your favourite text(s) about the sea?

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield is what immediately comes to mind. I’m a sucker for contemporary gothic literature, and when you make the two main characters a gay married couple? Say less. I’m hooked. The sea in this novel is a hauntingly, quietly destructive force. The entire novel itself feels like a tsunami. I could go on forever about this book, but all I’ll say right now is that it makes you lose your mind. In a good way.

You can read Will’s poem “Homosexual Commitment Issues While Hundreds Of Elk Die In Wyoming”, and listen to Will read it himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

I recently stumbled upon a 2004 article talking about how 400-500 elk in Wyoming ate lichen with too much acid in it and died, and around the same time I found this article I was reflecting on a relationship with someone from years ago who was in conflict with his feelings about him and me. In honour of this guy, I found a Vietnamese poetic form called the lục bát (“six-eight”) which is a complex form that is strict in its syllabic, rhyme, and tonal scheme. When it is used in English it loses its tonal beauty, which felt so appropriate in a poem that is so much about deterioration to use a form that in its own way deteriorates when translated to another language. And the rhyme scheme itself even has its own sense of descent or cascading that fit the theme as well. The poem is devoted to situating us humans as moments a part of the ecological cycles of life with the rest of nature, and how there is some sense of cosmic comfort in our transcendence, or spiritual existences, that lies in being-toward-oneness with nature despite of our oftentimes trivial anthropocentric endeavors and worries.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

This particular poem is most certainly in dialogue with Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days which is a brilliant eco-poetical work that centres the queer perspective. I am always writing with Kaveh Akbar in mind, particularly his book Pilgrim Bell, because of his masterful skill on writing the most human form of spirituality I have ever read that often influences all of my work.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes?

I start by writing by hand in my journal and the page(s) often look chaotic and nonsensical, but I need to feel the poem in my body first, then I write it in a Google Doc to see it in a clean format, then I write it back in my journal, and so on. It depends on the poem, but my craft is often a feedback loop between body (hand writing) and mind (structuring and visualising through typing into my computer).

What drew you to writing poetry?

As a teenager it was catharsis. But as an adult I am drawn to poetry as an exercise of surrender. Louis Gluck once wrote “the fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness... it is a life dignified by yearning.” I am captivated by the way poetry demands so much of a connection to the helplessness of desire and relinquishing my self to a process of uncertainty and bewilderment.

What song helps us get to know you better?

I think my whole personality can be summed up in the following playlist: Habibi by Tamino; Limbo by Lissom, Julien Marchal, & Lowswimmer; Ниточка в голове by Synecdoche Montauk; and Joga by Björk.

You can read Troy’s poem “Third”, and listen to Troy read it himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

I’d like to think that Third explores the possibilities of care that can take place between queer people in seemingly unexpected settings and temporalities. In the case of this poem, it’s about a connection two strangers can share after a purely physical sexual experience, and how real this connection can still be, even if it takes place in the middle of the night, walking out of a flat building where they just had an impromptu threesome, savouring a spark that lives and dies from one end of the road to another.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I think my poems exist thanks to the path paved by the likes of Kim Addonizio, Joseph Legaspi, Wanda Coleman, Savannah Brown, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Cecilia Knapp, Pascale Petit, and Essex Hemphill. I always go back to Marilyn Monroe’s poems for when I need to connect with a potent part of myself. I’m so lucky to have been taught by Rachel Long once as a Barbican Young Poet, and again as my mentor for my forthcoming collection. This is outside of the fact that I’m also just a massive fan of her poems.

Currently, I’m being held/challenged/moved by Saskia Hamilton, Paul Stephenson, Danez Smith, Frederick Seidel, Eliza Gonzalez, and Dzifa Benson.

What is your writing practice? Where and when do you write? By hand, laptop, phone notes…?

My early drafts tend to come into fruition when I’m on the tube to and from work via my Notes app, or running to my laptop while washing the dishes or hoovering the carpet. Something about inconvenience brings out inspiration, I suppose.

I wish I could say I have a more scheduled and regulated time frame in which I start my poems, but I find that rarely happens with work and other life responsibilities always in the way. I do find the evening time the best time to edit, once everything has simmered down to a close and I can focus a bit better.

Having kind and patient people around me is also super helpful and grounding, fellow poets I can spend time editing, developing drafts with, and just speaking out thoughts about poetry in general.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

I always go back to “Little Black Dress” by Tamar Yoseloff. I love how easy the internal rhymes flow into one another, how concise and well-cut it is, like how a classic and dependable piece of clothing would be. This poem also gave me permission to write about clothing and jewellery as valid poetic objects.

What’s on your bedside table?

I currently have a copy of my new pamphlet, Symmetric of Bone, nearby as I’ve just finished the launch event for it. I have a box of small perfume bottles that my best friend Ayaan Abdullahi got me for my birthday. There’s a selenite sphere inside a bowl. I also have a copy of All Souls by Saskia Hamilton, a poetry collection I’m really enjoying at the moment. I feel like I will enjoy it for a long time.

What song helps us get to know you better?

Busy Woman by Sabrina Carpenter.

You can read Cleo’s poem “To Bear Witness is an Act of Love”, and listen to Cleo read it herself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

This poem is based on a real event from the village I grew up in, where two dogs were hung over a bridge. I wanted to use this event to explore the role of the witness — our responsibility to see and record, but also the way that witnessing implicates us and can draw us into uncomfortable parallels and kinships with what we observe.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Whenever I write “pastorally”, I find myself in dialogue with ancient idyllic writers like Theocritus — the way these poems construct the pastoral as a world with its own limits, rules and edges is very interesting to me. I tend to find the history and traditions of forms or genre very helpful to bounce off of, and as a sonnet, this poem was very much in dialogue with other queer uses of sonnets like Alex Cocker's translations of Michaelangelo (and I guess, ultimately, Shakespeare!).

What is your writing practice?

I have a total inability to write at home, so writing always begins with a trudge off to a library, coffee shop or reading room. People often ask me if I think about poetry on my long walks to a writing venue and the answer is no! I tend to listen to very loud, angry and incoherent music and think about absolutely nothing — perhaps a way of wiping the slate clean before I get started.

What poem do you wish you'd written?

To me, Natalie Shapero is the ultimate magician. Her poems hang together so perfectly and as such discrete objects, but it is really hard to see the architecture beneath it. I have spent more time than I can admit reading The Sky and screaming “how does this work???” to myself.

What drew you to writing poetry?

Although I have tried and continue to try other forms, I am always drawn back to poetry for its sheer density — the way it can hold so much that might be seen as opposed or separate within one object and keep its cool.

You can read J-T’s poems, and listen to J-T read them himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about these poems?

Nub and Desert Dreams both come from my time in New Mexico. I moved there to make what would be my last serious attempt at finishing a college degree. It didn’t take, but I stayed for several years. The mountain desert does for me something like what everybody I know says the ocean does for them. Both of these poems came out of a 3-month period of prodigious output and creative rejuvenation brought on by reading Joe Elliot’s Index, an 11-page poem of fragments and jumps. I wouldn’t say my poems are anything like Index, but Elliot’s poem broke loose something in my head that let these poems out. Here’s a stanza from Index:

Like unfinished ease, this business goes
The part of you that’s a part of it and it wants to be conscious
The dandelion was not redundant
We don’t lack people here on the effortless coast
The face on fate, a lifelong acquaintance
The difference between manipulation and setting a boundary is
“How do you do?” for a living

Index from Oqposable Thumb (Subpress, 2006)

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

To be “in dialogue with” implies the conversation goes both directions, yes? There are poets I talk to a lot online, and we talk about poems, about poetry, we send each other poems and opinions. Then there are the poets, some dead, who I read and take seriously and whose work becomes part of the smell of the house. There are poets whose work I admire when I’m at work.

Here are some books I like very much by some poets I like very much that I think you might enjoy becoming more familiar with:

• Shell Game by Jordan Davis (Edge Books, 2018)

• The Ghost of It by Kyla Houbolt (CCCP/Subpress, 2024)

• Holy Fool by Henry Gould (Lulu.com, 2023)

• Light-Up Swan by Tom Snarsky (Ornithopter Press, 2021)

• What Pecan Light by Han VanderHart (Bull City Press, 2021)

What’s your favorite text about the sea?

I love this James Schuyler poem, The Edge in the Morning. It uses the word cenotaph, which means a memorial grave for someone buried somewhere else or whose body has not been found, and I always confuse the word with otolith, which is a tiny bone in your ear that sounds like a monument. James Schuyler always sounds to me like a man half dreaming, but then you catch on to how quick he is.

The edges of the bay are thinnest at high tide.
It is low tide. 
[...]
[The wind] crumples the bay and stuffs it in a stone pocket.
The bay agitatedly tries to smooth itself out.
If it were tissue paper it would need damp and an iron.
It is a good deal more than damp.
What a lot of water.

What’s on your bedside table?

I just returned a large pile of books from my bedside to the library after having kept them too long. But that has left me with some texts that I am returning to or hovering over because I still have some questions to ask them.

• Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets

• Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (positively slim at around 100

  pages!)

• William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All

• John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

• Gwendolyn Brooks’ Blacks

• Gertrude Stein’s How to Write

What draws you to writing poetry?

One of my persistent experiences of life is That’s not quite it. Another is How on earth does all this higglety-pigglety hang together? And while that may turn out to be somewhat true for everybody, I find that I experience it most in language. Or at least, I experience it most pointedly when language is at the centre of my experience. Poems are objects made of language. Also they can be beautiful. And beauty is hardly ever what you think it is. And it’s never what you say it is. If any of that makes you want to read a poem or write a poem, then I may have answered your question.

You can read T. S. Leonard’s poem “The Trojan”, and listen to him read it himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about this poem?

There’s a recurring character throughout my work, the Time Traveler, who pops up in different eras to observe or express some facet of the historic queer experience. The Trojan started as a piece about AIDS activists in the 1980s, with that moment at the end: “dinners after marching/kissing on the marble steps…”. I was thinking about ACT UP kiss-ins and the tragic, necessary camaraderie forged through shared grief and collective action. But the longer I lingered in the scene, the deeper back it went, and there was something about this ancient echo of battle and warfare that seemed to hold something, unfortunately, eternal. How many times has the Time Traveler seen his brothers and his lovers perish for something so senseless as war? How can he keep persisting? Forever, and with love.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

For the last couple of years I’ve had my strongest ongoing dialogue with the work of Tim Dlugos, whose poems in the 1970s and early 1980s are often very wry and wily with their humor and references, but who wrote, after receiving his HIV diagnosis, some of the most soulful, generous poems of the late century. His poems Healing the World from Battery Park and Ordinary Time and G-9 are just stunning—urgent, wide-open, pained but gorgeous—and essential documents from their impossible time.

What is your writing practice?

It depends. It changes. It erodes. It’s messy, or meticulous. Usually it starts with a piece of art or a song or someone else’s poem. Often, it’s about opening wide and swallowing whatever comes in, and catching what sticks. If I’m being really good and intentional, I’ll read a few poems and then take a long walk, trying to let the world in a bit. Plugging things into my Notes app. I try to sit at the kitchen table and with my notebook and write automatically for as long as I can. Once I start getting fussy with possible line breaks, I know it’s time to migrate to my laptop and get lost.

What’s on your bedside table?

My ideal reading diet, prescribed to anyone who asks, is to always be toggling between a novel, some poetry, and a book of nonfiction. It keeps things fizzy. Right now I’m reading Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan, which is like a gay tornado from 1999 France—I don’t know what it is yet exactly, but it’s good—and Victoria Chang’s new collection With My Back to the World. I’m just diving into The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser, which first appeared in 1949 but is every bit as timely now: “Always we need the audacity to speak for more freedom, more imagination, more poetry with all its meanings.” I mean, come on. Don’t we ever.

What song helps us get to know you better?

Bettye LaVette’s “Doin’ the Best That I Can” (Walter Gibbons 12” Mix). Eleven minutes of pure percussive fantasia, stretched to infinity when I put it on repeat for a writing soundtrack. Disco for the soul.

I came to the song through my love for Arthur Russell, another experimental producer and contemporary of Gibbons, whose meditative approach to dance music (repetition and release, bending time) has been a big influence on my poetry. The lyrics here are about a scorned lover trying to move on, but in Gibbons’s elongated remix we get Bettye (and her background singers) repeating the title line over and over again, and it becomes a bit like a mantra. Perfect motivation for facing the page and writing as best you can.

You can read Stuart’s poems, and listen to Stuart read them himself, in Issue One of the Seaford Review.

What can you tell us about these poems?

Waning Gibbous might be my most rejected poem, so I'm really happy it has found its home. It grew out of wanting to try a couple of things: first, writing my own “modern take on Greek myth” poem, and second using the slashes throughout, almost instead of line breaks. I had seen a lot of examples of both and I thought trying them out might make me write a little differently. I think I had just turned thirty and was a little more anxious than usual about getting older. I was also thinking about how I wanted the slashes to mark a split between different voices or ideas, so I settled quite quickly on the story of Ganymede and Zeus. The whole thing has really grown over a couple of years of editing and re-shaping, but these core ideas have remained throughout. I was very happy with the combination of subject and form when I started to think of the slashes as like twigs in a nest, hopefully bringing us back to the eagle imagery.

The title was one of the last things to change: for a long time this was just called Ganymede, thinking it might need to be grounded in the myth from the start. When I thought again about the line about Ganymede the moon of Jupiter (the “ninth largest object in our solar system”) the phase of the moon just past its prime seemed a perfect fit.

“Prompt” comes out of my very ambivalent feelings towards poetry prompts. I love formal exercises and constraints, but I find most writing prompts to be based on subject matter — “write about a time when x happened”, or “describe your feelings when you last y”, etc. I really struggle to write directly about my life like that, and prompts like this really tap into anxieties about my skills and approach as a poet. I think that's where this very scathing, antagonistic voice came from when I first just tried to write a list of absurdist prompts as a writing exercise. I quickly came to like this idea of having the voice of the poem explicitly outside and set against the poet.

I knew I wanted a recurring image to pull it all together, and I had put on one of the new Neon Genesis Evangelion films for background noise while I was editing one evening. The idea of inspiration or the poem itself being this monstrous alien slowly lumbering towards a poet before they meet and collapse into one another seemed too fun to pass up.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Wanting to write about myth seems pretty common in poetry, but I have always admired the approach taken by poets such as Anne Carson and Sandeep Parmar. I always go back to Carson’s Autobiography of Red; especially one the initial appendixes, where we find Helen of Troy sitting up with her glass of vermouth. Parmar's work is similarly allusive but in particular I was thinking of her second collection Eidolon, also another take on the story of Helen. Both treat the myth/story we know as something of a framework to work out their own ideas within/against, rather than retell or update the story. Formally I took a lot of inspiration from poets such as Vik Shirley and Hieu Minh Nguyen.

For Prompt, I was thinking about prompts like the ones found in Nine Arches Press's 52 series. This features a huge range of prompts, including some more formal ones I can get on board with.

If you're not familiar with Evangelion I honestly don't know how I could explain it here, other than to say it is the absolute best and worst of anime. (If you are familiar with it, feel free to swap out the image of Godzilla in the poem for one of the angels)

What poem do you wish you'd written?

There's a few things out there that, rather than wish I'd written them, I really wish I knew how to write like them. I really admire James Schuyler's work, especially longer works like Hymn to Life. I'm always amazed how Schuyler combines the New York Poets sensibilities with a real sense of calm and equilibrium you do not normally find in such work. The way he bounces around images in a poem like February calls to mind the O'Hara or Ashbery approach to subject matter, but it's all in this strange, quasi-Wordsworthian style of repose and recollection.

On a lighter note, part of me wishes I'd stuck with guitar lessons when I was younger so I could be in a Cheekface tribute act. I don't think I'll ever write a line as good as “The future is now! (Unfortunately)”.

What's your first poetry memory?

I'd studied poems in school, but I think the first time I remember enjoying them was actually in an exam. A high school English exam required a close reading of a Louis MacNeice poem, I think it was “The Sunlight on the Garden”, and I just connected with it right away. I bought my first collection, his Selected Poems, soon after.

What's on your bedside table?

I'm currently swapping between A K Blakemore's The Glutton and Nuar Alsadir's Animal Joy, both of which are fantastic – although Animal Joy’s passages about “false poems” had me guiltily rewriting a couple of my own. I'm looking forward to starting Goodlord by Ella Frears, which I picked up after seeing her and Caroline Bird at Push the Boat Out a few weeks ago.

I've also got Nisha Ramayya's Fantasia and a recent edition of Shearsman magazine sitting ready to start. I also have a copy of Jane Eyre at my boyfriend's place which I am very, very slowly working my way through. It has not improved my opinion of “classic” Victorian novels, if I'm honest.

What's your favourite text(s) about the sea?

It feels embarrassing/basic to admit, but I do love Moby-Dick. I would not exactly say it is under-appreciated, but you tend not to hear about how mad and even queer some of it is. I always find the back and forth between adventures on the high seas and some truly bizarre “informational” chapters strangely compelling.

“Texts about the sea” also makes me think of the final passages of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, with Lily finishing her painting as she watches the Ramsay family traveling by boat.

I've been on a bit of a sci-fi kick since I picked up my old flatmate’s Consider Phlebas during lockdown, and one of the best I've read was Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. It is a strange, unsettling novella set in a station orbiting a planet entirely covered in ocean. I don't want to say more, but the book and the Tarkovsky film are both well worth checking out for a sombre, contemplative sci fi experience.

Oh, and of course there's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

Oh, and I almost forgot to include any time the cast of The Real Housewives of New York get on a boat…

One of the ways we’ll do this is by offering our published poets the opportunity to do a Q&A, which will follow in the wake of the issue that features that poet’s work. As a way to kickstart this process, we thought we’d run an initial Q&A with our editors, this time with Chris. The idea is to help our readers get acquainted with the editorial team before submissions open in September, as well as with the rough format that the Q&A will take.

Christopher Lloyd (he/him) was born in South Wales in 1987. He is the author of the poetry pamphlet Pick Up Your Feelings (Fourteen publishing, 2024), as well as stories, essays, and poems such as ‘contact high’, recently published in annie journal.

Jack Westmore: Hey Chris! (I’m calling you Chris rather than Christopher, obvs).

Chris Lloyd: Hi Jack. I’m the last up in this series so pressure is on to be interesting!

JW: Good luck with that. 

Jack laughs. 

JW: Let’s start simple. I think I know this, but do you have a particular writing practice? Where and when, how, are there snacks, music? 

CL: In short, no. I have no consistent practice for writing, whether poetry or otherwise. I sometimes write in notebooks (I have many) but that tends to just be lines or images or words I find interesting. It’s more of a way to remember certain sounds or ideas. I can only really write on the computer: something about typing poems out on the screen really helps me to see it and inhabit it. I find that near-impossible writing by hand. (We are very different, I know!)

I can’t listen to music while I write, but it’s there in the writing scene, if you like. 

JW: We’ll come onto that later.

CL: Ha, okay. There is always tea or coffee, usually a sweet snack of some kind. But I write when I’m inspired, or when I’m really feeling the urge to try something out on the page/screen. I wish I was more disciplined. 

JW: What draws you to writing poetry? I know you write in other forms too.

CL: I started writing fiction and poetry before getting into academia—as a kid really—but then writing for scholarly publication kinda takes over. Once I was into the PhD, it was hard, for me at least, to find brain-space for more creative forms of writing. 

For me, poetry has always been a way of trying things out (finding things out?). Where my prose is driven by narrative and character first and foremost, poetry is driven by language, by speculation. My poems sometimes begin with a kernel of emotion (maybe a sensation I’ve had or witnessed, or maybe an affective state I’m in) but then I use that to springboard elsewhere. I don’t want to linger in the feeling too much; I worry that I’ll just be writing a diary entry. 

Ideally poems, in my mind, are about language and sound, about the potentialities inherent in poetic form. When you arrange words into lines—rather than sentences—you are thinking in a different kind of linguistic unit. You are no longer dedicated to the sense-making architecture of a sentence, but rather to the ambiguities of the line, the stanza. You can end a line mid-way through a thought or phrase; enjambment is the real engine of poetic movement, and that’s exciting to me. The things you can get away with, the plural meanings a line can generate from being broken like that. 

In other words, poems do things on the page (and off the page, of course) that other forms of writing can’t. I think by attending to language’s flexibility, poems are uniquely placed to help us understand how language itself shapes everything.

JW: So, we know what you think poetry does, but which poem do you wish you’d written?

CL: There are so many poems that I wish I’d written. Like, too many. And I wish I could pick something queer here, but the poem that most feels like something I might write (had I the ability!) is Billy Collins’ “The Breather.” I know we’ve talked about it before, but I think it’s such a brilliant example of a poem doing many things at once. It feels and sounds like ordinary speech (“well, sometimes”) but it also reaches towards beauty (“our tender overlapping”). It is a remarkably taut poem even as it feels loose and easy. I have no idea how he did this. It’s also about that horror movie trope of the call coming from “inside the house,” which is fun at first, and then by the second stanza you realise it’s actually about a non-existent relationship—is it a fantasy, a past lover, a dead one? The poem moves so slowly and effortlessly through this very precise image—“it’s just been me dialling myself/then following the ringing to another room”—in a way that is both beautiful and devastating. I would love to have written this, or one day approximate something so shattering. 

JW: So, as hinted at, I know that music is everywhere in your poems. Your pamphlet is even titled after thee Jazmine Sullivan’s “Pick Up Your Feelings.” Indeed, we’re having this chat after having seen her live recently in Manchester. We probably shouldn’t get derailed but… 

[they talk at length about how good the gig was]

JW: But what songs would help us to get to know you better?  

CL: As you say, songs saturate my world: I am always listening to something. Music, like poetry, taps into multiple emotional realms at once: it’s auditory, it’s linguistic, it’s affective and bodily. I have poems written after songs and lyrics, like Jazmine’s (cry emoji). 

If you want to get to know me (and my work I guess), I’d say these two songs. Yes, they are of course heartbreak songs. The first is Jazmine’s “Lost One,” and this live version is one of the best things I’ve ever seen/heard. After a breakup, the singer is mournfully asking, “don’t have too much fun without me,” “try not to love no one.” Like, come on. You should also watch her version of “Home” from The Wiz, sung as an eleven-year-old, better than most adults on the planet.

The second is Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” the most upsetting song out there, I think. The title tells you everything. It’s so direct, so vulnerable, so deeply honest. I cry every time. This version from the 1992 Grammys is worth a watch, but so is the original track. (There are good covers of it, too, from George Michael to Bon Iver, but I really love this one from Samoht, which is turned almost into a kind of ministry).

JW: Okay, now you’ve brought us all down, here’s the last question. What’s on your bedside table? 

CL: Ha, sorry. Okay, this is intimate! The things I can tell you about, in no particular order: antihistamines; some jewellery; a brush for the cat; my therapy and dream notebook—

JW: Very Gillian Anderson in The Fall! 

CL: Oh yes, except I don’t have a fancy fountain pen for it. Also… my Nintendo Switch; and then a stack of books. Currently: Robyn Crawford’s memoir about Whitney (borrowed from you), Jordy Rosenberg’s novel Confessions of the Fox, Jamieson Webster’s book on psychoanalysis, Disorganization and Sex, and Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental.

JW: Do you recommend any of these? 

CL: Totally, they’re all super interesting. I love the memoir as I’ve been trying to write this essay on Whitney for a while. And Webster’s book of short essays is insightful and weird and always helps inspire some new thoughts on the psyche.  

JW: Given we are the Seaford Review, what’s your favourite text about the sea? 

CL: Well, most people that know me know that I am obsessed with the sea. Put me near the ocean—or, in a pinch, any other body of water—and I’m instantly calmer. The sound and sight of water really puts me at ease and slows me down.

For a while, I loved John Banville’s The Sea, but I haven’t read it in a long time, and I know he’s super problematic so maybe we won’t say that one. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi was also big for me when I was in my early twenties. I might say Tove Jansson’s work actually. She’s the creator of the Moomins—

JW: We love.

CL: We do. But her adult fiction, especially all her short stories, are filled with Scandinavian watery landscapes. They’re always set on small islands, and in boats. Always at the water’s edge. She writes so luminously about being near water, I highly recommend all of her books (read The Winter Book as soon as it gets chilly outside). 

JW: On that lovely recommendation, I want to thank you for sitting down with me and chatting.

CL: My pleasure, king. 

Submissions for the first edition of the Seaford Review will open in September. Stay up-to-date by following us on Instagram and X/Twitter.

One of the ways we’ll do this is by offering our published poets the opportunity to do a Q&A, which will follow in the wake of the issue that features that poet’s work. As a way to kickstart this process, we thought we’d run an initial Q&A with our editors, this time with Luís. The idea is to help our readers get acquainted with the editorial team before submissions open in September, as well as with the rough format that the Q&A will take.

Luís was born in Lisbon, has lived in London for the past twelve years, and now calls Warsaw his home. He is the author of the pamphlet two dying lovers holding a cat (fourteen publishing, 2024), and his poems have been published in several literary magazines and journals. For a taste of his writing, you can find his poem Rite in Issue 3 of The Marbled Sigh.

Christopher Lloyd: Hi Luís, welcome!

Luís Costa: Hello Chris!

CL: I suppose I will start with the same question you asked Jack. Can you tell me a little about your writing practice? Where and when do you write?

LC: I am a ritualistic person, so I have a few places where I like to write, depending on the stage of the process. When there is an idea for a poem and I have gathered enough of it - and this varies a lot: sometimes it’s only a word, other times full verses - I like writing in my local pub.

CL: Okay, pause. I have to ask what you drink now.

LC: In the warmer months, a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Sorry, Chris, I know you dislike this wine! Most of the year, a glass of Malbec is my go to. I always pick the same table though.

Both laugh

LC: In contrast with my organised, more routine-oriented nature, I prefer a more chaotic space to write. So I have written most of my poems in bars and coffee shops, particularly when travelling. 

After putting the words to a page, I tend to edit the poems at home in a quieter environment, often at my dining table. Great things always happen at dining tables. That being said,  most of my writing process happens when I am actually not writing.

I like to go on long walks or runs with music, that is usually when the ideas come about. I end up sending a lot of messages to myself with thoughts, lines, or out of breath voice recordings if I’m jogging, which I later transform into poems. 

CL: It seems like your writing process has an ongoing element to it?

LC: Most definitely. A lot of writers will relate to this, I suppose. But my writing also serves, ironically, as a way to crystallise a moment, an experience, or a feeling. And this ties in with the travelling aspect I mentioned earlier. There is so much happening when you travel. New languages, new views, new people. My poetry is so influenced by this… and then tries to make emotional sense of it too.

CL: I would say there are often aspects associated with different cultures, whether through imagery or language, which surround the action or emotional space of your poems.

LC: Yes, I imagine I will always have this element in my writing. After all, I’m a migrant, I’m constantly surrounded by cultural elements that I borrow. The most evident one being that I write in a foreign language. This is such a beautiful thing, it adds a unique layer to my work. 

CL: Is this something you have thought about exploring more?

LC: It is surely something I will address further, especially when it comes to my cultural identity, which is made of so many parts now. Time will tell where it goes, but at the moment I will continue to bring this into my poetry, even if in more subtle ways.

CL: And what other topics would you say tend to inspire you?

LC: Anyone who has read my poems will probably say heartbreak. Or death.

Both laugh

LC: And while I have written a fair bit about those topics, I prefer to think that rather than topics, a key element of my poetry is its particularly visual nature. It uses a lot of vivid imagery to convey feelings (yes, sometimes heartbreak and grief and sadness). And this is because I feel very connected and inspired by visual art. It tends to move me greatly, probably only second to music. For example, after visiting a museum or a gallery, I write a lot. 

I’ve always been a  creative person and very much in touch with the arts throughout my life, particularly music as I started to learn how to play the piano at a very young age. But some visual art has this overwhelming power to uncover emotions in me, which I then explore in my poetry - often in a nonlinear way. 

CL: This makes a lot of sense.

LC: And one thing I used to often was ekphrastic poetry, mostly for the now sadly extinct Visual Verse poetry magazine; I adore using visual art as a prompt, probably because I project feelings onto images more than anything. So in a way, a painting or a photograph can serve as a mediator for my poetry.

CL: I will put you on the spot now. Is there any particular artwork that comes to mind?

LC: laughs 

Sure. I was just in Vienna and saw the Waterlily Pond by Monet, which inspired a poem shortly after. I hate typing on my phone, but I had no other way as I was out and about, so the poem was born on a note. This is an example of a painting which evoked such strong feelings in me, I needed to put them down straight away. Almost as if I decoded or deciphered them in the poem. Poetry is a way of decoding experiences.

CL: I love that.

LC: Yes. Funny enough, parallel to psychology, my background is incredibly analytical. I spend a lot of time looking at numbers and statistical analysis. Poetry, in a way, serves as equations for my emotional world. Even if sometimes there are no solutions.

Both laugh.

CL: I think we can all relate to that. Can you tell me about one of your recent poems?

They discuss Luís’ poem Rite 

CL: This is also an example of a poem that references and is inspired by a piece of art: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. And one that also uses powerful imagery.

LC: Exactly. This poem is part of a group of poems I have written earlier this year exploring death and grief. Specifically, the experience of being surrounded by it, when you are trying to move within the fog. 

The idea for this poem actually came to me in Seaford, so it is only right I chose this one for us to discuss today. I remember turning on a radio in the kitchen, listening to an orchestral piece and realising how effortlessly it invaded the room. It didn’t matter what I was thinking or feeling. It just was. So in the poem I describe this scenario in which daily things are still very much occurring whilst I am paralysed by the pain of loss.

CL: The pasta boiling, the clothes drying.

LC: Yes. And how it is all part of this rite we perform when we grieve.

CL: There is also an element of hope in this poem…

LC: There is - I used the spring imagery, directly from Stravinsky, tying it all together. At the end of the rite we need to perform to process the insurmountable weight of loss, there is light. The clocks change at the end of winter, nights get shorter.

CL: You know what I will ask you now. Tell me about a poem you wish you had written.

LC: Of course! I will always give the same answer to this question, because it’s my favourite poem. And it is also related to the one we just discussed. It’s called Kot w pustym mieszkaniu/Cat in an empty apartment, by Wisława Szymborska. It is a  gorgeous poem that explores grief through the perspective of a cat. That first verse “Dying – you wouldn’t do that to a cat.” is so powerful. 

There are so many things to love about this poem: the absence described through heartbreaking yet quotidian imagery, the humour, the way it so lightly taps into darkness. It’s beautifully crafted and I love the storytelling element of it, which is something I am trying to explore more in my own poetry as of late.

CL: It is a stunning poem. Can you also tell me what is on your bedside table?

LC: I don’t keep a lot of books on the bedside table, as they tend to circulate around the house,  so I will not be very literary with my answer. However, I do have a copy of the Polish edition of the Little Prince, which I bought when I started learning the language a couple of years ago.  I read it many times as a kid - and I firmly believe everyone should read this book. Particularly if you are a poet. I also have a Nigella Lawson candle and my earphones –

CL: This is extremely you-coded!

Both laugh 

LC: Evidently

CL: Lastly, tell me about your aspirations for the Seaford Review?

LC: Poetry is on a comeback tour, which is fantastic. There are so many amazing poets out there, making astonishing and very different and unusual poetry right now. I want the Seaford Review to be the home for these poems, but more importantly for the poets themselves. 

As we will aim to give our readers more insight into the poets’ work and experiences, I hope we can provide a platform for these voices, so they can reach wider audiences. I truly want our readers to feel they know the poets a little bit - and I want the poets to feel they were given a stage to showcase their work, their personalities, and how the two are tied together.

Submissions for the first edition of the Seaford Review will open in September. Stay up-to-date by following us on Instagram and X/Twitter.

One of the ways we’ll do this is by offering our published poets the opportunity to do a Q&A, which will follow in the wake of the issue that features that poet’s work. As a way to kickstart this process, we thought we’d run an initial Q&A with our editors, starting with Jack. The idea is to help our readers get acquainted with the editorial team before submissions open in September, as well as with the rough format that the Q&A will take.

Jack is a poet and software engineer who grew up, and still lives in, London. He’s been writing poetry since he was a teenager, and was a past recipient of the Tower Poetry Prize (second place). For a taste of his writing, you can find Jack’s poem “Fountain” in a recent edition of Tin Can Poetry.

Luís Costa: Hi Jack, welcome.

Jack Westmore: Hi Luís!

Both laugh.

LC: To get things started, can you tell me a bit about your writing practice? Where and how do you write? Do you write by hand, in your phone, on a laptop…?

JW: On a good day, I feel as if I am constantly writing. I am always noticing things, taking notes in my phone about things I’ve seen or thoughts I’ve had, or turns of phrase I’ve heard… it’s a kind of madness. John Ashbery once said “the pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me”, which is something I’ve always felt, and agreed with.1 You can find poetry wherever you look, if you’re looking the right way.

And sometimes I wish I could write it all down, because it seems so precious to me. Other times — the other day, for instance, when getting to the end of a lane in the swimming pool — I am suddenly shocked all over again, and out of the blue, that there is so much that I can’t remember: so much I’ll never get back.

LC: Would you say, then, that writing serves a kind of memorialising function for you?

JW: Definitely. I am a nostalgic person — although I say it slightly lightly, I am a Cancer, ha — and sometimes I think that I write because I’m sad and want to hold onto things. Plato said that originally, I think in The Republic: that writing is just a crutch for our memories. And remember, he was writing at a time when writing was a relatively new technology. Or at least, not available to everybody and kind of universal in the way it is nowadays. It’s hard for me to imagine a time when, if you couldn’t remember a thing, then it was probably lost for good…

But writing is also a way of making more of my experience. It’s not just about hanging onto it or recording it: it’s about giving meaning to, and understanding, it.

LC: About revisiting it.

JW: Right. And often when I am writing my journal — which I do by hand, actually, with a pencil, because it forces me to travel more slowly and take more care — I am by nature quite a slapdash person — it’s only then that I’ll start to understand why a particular thing stood out to me, why it spoke to me. By writing about it I might see why I wanted to write about it in the first place.

LC: Can you talk to me about one of your recent poems?

They discuss Jack’s poem “Fountain”.

JW: I can’t remember where this poem originally came from: it must have been from my notes or from my journal or from a memory I’d had. I have this bizarre memory of being in primary school, how there was this completely artificial divide between the older kids — who were 9 or 10 years old — and the younger kids. As one of the younger children, I remember the older kids were colloquially referred to as “the bigguns”, as if they were this kind of monster from the Brothers’ Grimm…

Both laugh.

I don’t know where that came from, but I do remember it being endorsed by the teachers, weirdly. They seemed to be completely foreign to us “younguns”, in another world. And anyway, I think that memory or that scenario was sort of in the back of my mind when I was making Fountain. Along with the other things one carries about, of course.

LC: So you could say that there’s an idea, in this poem, of the poet or author being an outsider to another group, wanting to be a part of that…

JW: Yes, exactly. It’s the kind of absurd scenario of somebody who wants to be in the ‘in group’ — when the stakes, in this case, couldn’t really be lower, because it’s about learning to use a urinal! — and feeling so pleased with oneself when one masters the techniques and “utterances” of that group.

LC: When the urinal isn’t simply a urinal.

JW: It’s symbolic of being something else: being a “big boy”.

LC: I sometimes think that a lot of poetry is written by outsiders. Or by people who feel as if they are outsiders, at least…

JW: I think that was kind of the experience which inspired this poem. But, you know, it’s also a kind of loss-of-innocence thing, right?

It’s humorous, of course, this scenario of being accepted by the father figure — or, presumably being accepted, as we don’t actually get the father’s response to the “success” of the boy figure — and also being accepted by the “big boys”, whoever or whatever they are. But you lose something of yourself spending so much time trying to be involved with others, and liked by them. That’s something I’ve had to learn.

LC: And there’s a slight sexual undertone to the “big boys”, too…

JW: Yep.

Both laugh.

LC: Tell me about a poem you wish you’d written.

JW: It’s not a poem, but I recently read Jessica Au’s short novel Cold Enough for Snow. I wish I could have written that book. It’s so beautiful and ethereal and poetic. And filled with longing, of course.

LC: Can you tell me what’s on your bedside table?

JW: Mostly books, of course, haha. At the moment I’ve been reading quite a few Yasunari Kawabata novels, so there’s a small stack of those. Eric Yip’s recent pamphlet, which I love and am absorbing at the moment. A copy of Richard Siken’s Crush, another favourite, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain, which I borrowed from my father’s library lately. A scifi novel I’ve been meaning to read for ages. My house keys and earphones…

LC: That’s a diverse selection!

JW: It’s pretty aspirational ha. There are some other things there too, but I could go on…

LC: Lastly, what are your aspirations for the Seaford Review? What hopes do you have for it?

JW: I think there’s an amazing undercurrent or underscene of people writing and making and involved with poetry in all kinds of ways, at the moment. My father pointed this out to me recently, when I was talking with him: how it struck him as almost strange that there was so much poetry being made at the moment. It seems to be there wherever you look. There are so many good independent presses and online literary magazines and spoken word or open mic nights.

But I don’t think it’s that strange. In fact, it seems pretty obvious to me: we live in extraordinary times, where the world seems to be continually disappearing and remaking itself before our very eyes. It’s no wonder for me, that in the midst of that, people would turn to poetry as a way to try and understand and communicate something of their inner experience. Even just a small part. Above all else, I hope that, with our work, we can provide a forum — a space — to give room to some of that expression.

Submissions for the first edition of the Seaford Review will open in September. Stay up-to-date by following us on Instagram and X/Twitter.