What can you tell us about this poem?
This poem is part of a pamphlet titled The Fabric, inspired by lesbian babymaking.
The initial idea for this particular poem came when some friends moved into a house next door to the fertility clinic that gave me and my wife our pregnancies and our daughter. What a remarkable thing, to be cleaning your bathroom or whatever, right next to all that potential life. Many people had a hand in helping us grow our family, and the poems in the pamphlet aim to acknowledge “the village” of it all. The guy who gets paid to clean corporate fish tanks doesn’t know he’s part of our story, but he is.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?
I’m drawn to any poetry that can spin awe from domesticity. Sharon Olds is an olympian at it. With this series of poems specifically, I owe a debt of gratitude to Erica Gillingham’s pamphlet The Human Body Is A Hive, for reassuring me that there’s art to be found in sharps bins and stirrups.

What is your writing practice?
My brain likes the early morning. I fight the urge to bother my snoozy nightowl wife and, most days, make it out of bed before anyone else in the house to spend a bit of time scrawling by hand in a notebook with a cup of tea.

Sometimes the scrawls become poems. More often, they do not. I throw my notebooks out when they’re full. It’s a challenge to myself to trust that if the idea is right for me, I’ll remember it.

What poem do you wish you’d written?
Ada Limon’s Love Poem With Apologies For My Appearance. A gorgeous, stained, unglamorous, deeply romantic celebration of long-term love.

What song helps us get to know you better?
I’m not sure if this is cheating, but I have a playlist I made while writing the poems that would go on to form The Fabric. I couldn’t tell you exactly what pulls the tracks together, but I think the throughline is something to do with intimacy.

I’m a sucker for a voice crack, a bum note, analog fuzziness, Tirzah sounding like she’s singing directly into your ear.

Then you’ve got the lyrics: John Grant listing things from his childhood favourite candy store. Magazine’s “look what fear’s done to my body”. serpentwithfeet and Kelela reminding you “it’s not just me, it’s everyone”.

What can you tell us about this poem?

“Sweetheart” is about my paternal grandfather, and about inheritance, memory and absence. The RAF-issued sweetheart ring originally belonged to my grandmother and was given to me when I was six, after she died. I have carried it with me ever since, usually on a necklace. I was very close to my grandfather growing up, and the poem holds the grief of losing him alongside the more complicated grief of estrangement from my father.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I wrote “Sweetheart” as part of a series of poems using a modern sonnet form, after reading frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss. I draw inspiration from poets such as Tony Harrison, particularly in the use of objects and language that are specific to class and place — the word gip, for example, being characteristic of Northern English dialect. I also tend to undercut myself with humour or self-deprecation when my writing begins to lean too sentimental, and I connect with that impulse in Philip Larkin’s work, particularly “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

“Having a Coke With You” by Frank O’Hara, which I know almost verbatim. It feels effortless, intimate and alive in a way I’m always chasing in my own writing.

What drew you to writing poetry?

A good friend took me to a reading at York Literature Festival a few years ago, which I absolutely loved. It sparked a passion for poetry and writing in me — and it turns out I have quite a lot to say.

What song helps us get to know you better?

Blues on the Ceiling, by Karen Dalton.

What can you tell us about this poem, “Divining Rod as Straight Culture”?

This poem was written during my first year as part of Barbican Young Poets when we were invited to respond to Citra Sasmita’s sumptuous exhibition Into Eternal Land at the Curve Gallery. At that same time, President Trump issued the Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production. So much of Sasmita’s work centered on roots and wombs while I felt like much of my own upbringing was being literally uprooted. Growing up openly queer in the suburbs of the American Midwest brought its own set of challenges; state parks and woodland walks were places where I felt protected, where I could exist and breathe. Many of these lines in the poem harken back to my own relationship with nature and folklore (afternoons spent inside a conclave of pine trees; throwing apple rinds behind my back to find the first letter of my future spouse’s name). All of these images and memories began to braid themselves quite naturally for me.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I work as an archivist for a visual and concrete poetry collector, so a lot of my time is spent cataloguing communication between poets. As for myself, Daniel Grimston is a poet and playwright who I have had the fortune to engage in many a caffeinated dialogue with. Their work is so rooted in place, whereas I am writing to make sense of where I come from. Angbeen Abbas and the whole crew at Page of Wands have made a radical free space for London-based writers to congregate (on that note, save SET Social!). I’m currently collaborating with poets Jasmin Allenspach, Francis-Xavier Mukiibi, Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha, and Pallas Yiu on a polyphonic piece which remains a humbling act to create work together. And a special shoutout to Glasgow-based Bluey Little, whose shared love of postcards led to us co-coordinating a mail art exquisite corpse-style poetry project with fifteen other poets at the Barbican Centre. Being in active dialogue with poets, be that through archiving or collaboration, remains crucial to my practice and the upholding belief that poetry exists as an ecosystem.

Do you write in other forms? (Prose etc) how do you toggle between them?

Oh my, so I started out writing across theatre, television, and interactive media and turned to prose at some point during the Covid lockdowns. Poetry became a more central practice while waiting for the dust to settle on early novel drafts. Writing poetry has nurtured the editing process for prose on a sentence-by-sentence level. Performing poetry brings me back to play readings and listening and learning from an audience. I don’t know if I am consciously toggling between forms, but I am heavily informed by them and value the varied experience.

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

Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. An old friend with strange appetites, one I am waiting to revisit.

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What can you tell us about this poem?

Lunar New Year tells the story of a first date. If anyone’s concerned, I promise I don’t write about every first date I go on… but maybe heed this as a warning to never ghost a poet.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

Seán Hewitt writes poetry and prose that feels like watching dappled sunlight in the breeze. My favourite poem of his is Wild Garlic – I think of it every time I walk through the woods in spring.

Whenever I need cheering up, I turn to Harry Baker and his poetry podcast Something Borrowed. Few other poets capture the absurdities and small wonders of adulthood in such a funny and heartfelt way.

I recently stumbled across My Gender is the Undoing of Gender by Andrea Gibson and it was one of those moments where I realised that they have articulated so much of what I’ve been trying to find within myself and my own work. It was a release, in a way. I don’t need to write a poem about it – Andrea has done that for me.

What is your writing practice?

I find that an idea has to come to me of its own volition, I can’t sit down in front of my laptop and will it to happen. Usually, I’ll be in the park or on my way to the supermarket when something will float into my head and I’ll have to scramble for my notes app or leave myself a voice note for later.

Having said that… I’m part of a London-based writing community called Word Space. We run frequent poetry workshops and open mics, which often involve prompt-based writing time. Sometimes this yields ideas for me, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s the beauty of it. What is perhaps most precious about these moments though is being surrounded by other poets and really listening to them, giving them your full attention. So much of poetry is about connection, and besides, someone may say something that might return as inspiration later when I’m heading to Sainsbury’s for a Kinder Bueno.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

There are so many, but one that immediately comes to mind is Courgettes by Andrew Dennison. It sings on the page and reminds me of my mum’s garden.

What’s on your bedside table? Books etc?

My bedside table is really just my bedroom floor, which is currently strewn with various things, including: Heartstopper Volume 6, The Last Lesbian Bar in the Midlands by Cleo Henry, empty paracetamol packets, paper party hats, a single can of Guinness, and pens that may or may not work. If my mum is reading this, she’ll be disappointed, yet unsurprised by my incessant inability to grow out of being messy.

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What can you tell us about this poem?

‘The thing that washed up on the beach’ is about being confronted with the memory of a toxic man. The ex resurfaces as uncanny, indiscriminate and fishlike. This man, who once exerted control over the speaker, has now been reduced to something pathetic and totally impotent. It’s about processing trauma, reclaiming female power, and taking ownership of the past. The ocean is such a transformative force, so I wanted to present it as the site of change.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

This poem began as a response to Roderick Ford’s ‘Giuseppe’. In Ford’s poem, a captured mermaid is dehumanised and murdered by men who insist that she is “only a fish.” I was interested in subverting this dynamic. Rather than the female figure being the silenced creature subject to male violence, the violent male is reimagined as the fish. I’m also in dialogue with Jo Shapcott, who uses animal metamorphosis to explore otherness and embodiment in pieces like ‘Goat’. Richard Scott was doubtless also an inspiration, his use of the animalistic to convey how we survive trauma. I’m thinking about poems like ‘crocodile’.

What poem do you wish you’d written?

‘The Last Supper’ by Mary Ruefle. Honestly, wow!

What’s your first poetry memory?

Probably my mum reading me Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. An absolute classic, but I was delighted by the eccentric progression of the poem. The image of the “pea-green boat” was simple but so pleasing. And then there was this “runcible spoon”. Runcible is a made-up word, but (somehow!) you have a sense of what it means. This was when I discovered that poetry is a unique medium: it doesn’t have to adhere to typical rules if you don’t want it to. It can articulate truths through a state of nonconformity, and I think that’s just beautiful.

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What can you tell us about your poem?

I vaguely remember setting out with the intention of writing an ‘origin story’ poem, one that explores where my loneliness, a certain feeling of always being slightly at the peripheries, came from. This took me back to my time at a boarding school in a sleepy little town in Massachusetts. Loneliness was certainly one of the throughlines I found, and this wasn’t entirely surprising – I was a 15-year-old 10,000km from home, after all. But I was also reminded of the friends I spent much of my time with, who must have been coming of age in their own way, and trying to grapple with their own complex inner lives. I think “New England fragments” ended up being about loneliness, as much as about the mundane moments of co-presence that made these years a bit more bearable for us, even if we might not have recognized them as such back then.

What poets and poems are you in dialogue with?

I’m inspired by how attuned Jenny Xie’s poems are to the observable world and the psychic world at once. Her poetry reminds me that there’s a unique vantage point opened up by solitude and meandering – physical, psychological, and formal. I aspire for the philosophical profundity that Sandra Lim packs into her sparse poems, and her ultra-precise, economical diction. Jean Rhys is particularly brilliant, and inspired me to write my own sparsest poem yet. I’m grateful to have been recently introduced to the work of the late Max Ritvo. I hope to imagine a little more like him and take more confident leaps in the worlds that I build in my poems.

What is your writing practice?

I’m a slow writer who needs words, phrases, or ideas to steep for a while before they find their place in a poem. Most of my poems pool materials that have been sitting in my notebook or my phone notes for weeks, sometimes months. Part of maturing as a writer, I think, was growing more comfortable with the slowness of this process, and periods of quietude. It has helped to set myself challenges (trying to write a poem without an “I”, or a poem inspired by a piece of music, for instance). Over time, though, I think I’ve also come to believe that something is still happening even when a poem is not being brought into existence, so long as I stay ready to receive and am thinking about surprising ways to cast language onto the mundane.

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

I spend much of my working day reading and writing academic texts, primarily in anthropology. My poetry was once described as “essayistic”, which might be a quality carried over from my academic writing. Conversely, when I’m working on academic articles, trying to find ways for my arguments to land, I find myself longing for the hesitations and loose knots that poetry permits. But I think toggling between forms can be surprisingly productive, as well. The language in much of academic and theoretical texts are so far from demotic language, but precisely because it is, it can help you think about words in a new light, and laterally across registers, which can definitely kindle the poetic imagination.

“Weak theory” in New England fragments comes from the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, who builds on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s original formulation. Stewart calls for a kind of theory that attends to the emergent and the ordinary, even if these processes of becoming might not “add up” in a way that is amenable to conventional theorization. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to read hers as a call to be a little more poetic in the way we theorize. I think this is just one of the many ways of thinking about the potential synergy between the two forms.

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

I love the mystique and longing in Mark Strand’s Black Sea.

What song helps us get to know you better?

One of my fondest memories associated with music is sitting in the passenger seat in my mom’s car as a child, as we listened to the CDs her friend had burned for her. There were some real gems in these carefully curated tracklists, ranging from trendy dance-pop to heart-wrenching ballads. Listening to these songs over and over again as she drove me around Seoul was probably when I realized that I love music and what it stirs in me. Sky by Loveholic was one of my favorites from these CD’s. My mom and I probably still both know it by heart.

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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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a year 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.