Enter Our Poetry Competition…

Writing poetry is a completely different experience for me than writing a novel…

It was one of those poems that just arrived fully formed – I find they are, somewhat annoyingly, much better than the ones I spend months fussing over…

Poetry is for everyone; you only need to find a voice that can reach you.

I think inspiration is everywhere, but you only see it if you’re awake and you’re receptive.

It was between 4 and 5 am; the house was quiet. I remember staring at a pile of orange peels on the desk across the room from me. This poem just poured out – I wrote it in one go.

My poems don’t usually begin as ideas-for-poems. They tend to be borne out of an attempt to solve a problem—some confusion that needs to be untangled and sorted out.

Everyday life provides so much content for poems in the emotional and political sense. One week it could be something in the news, the next it could be a piece of fruit…

Poetry, like other creative arts, is a medium where you can explore the truth of yourself and the world, whether that is as a writer or reader of it…

Creativity is at the heart of humanity, and so engaging in any creative act serves as a portal toward deeper consciousness and empathy. Whether by writing or reading it, poetry offers…

Do not deny what grabs hold of you. Poetry can be as rigid or as fluid as you want it to be. It has the power to contain any thought imaginable…

I mean this in the nicest way possible—get over yourself. Don’t be afraid to write bad, cringe-worthy poems. You will never get it perfectly on your first attempt, and that’s okay…

At all times, be honest. Honest with how you feel, what you think, why you think it. If you think a poem doesn’t work, tinker with it until it does, but no poem will ever become fully formed unless…

People are yearning for others to connect with them at the core of who they are, where the disappointment, shame, heartache, confusion has been shoved. I want to get down dirty…

I write in this discipline to capture bursts of feeling and emotion and to create textured work that I can revisit to help me understand certain feelings that I had at that particular timepoint…

I think everything and anything can form the basis for and breathe life into a poem yet unborn – a falling leaf, a murky puddle, a chipped rock, a stranger’s smile…

“Almost” is also about the dichotomy of connection and separation, and I wanted to explore that feeling we sometimes get of being separated from each other and separated from humanity…

I think that my best work, and the work that I feel has begun to capture my poetic voice more clearly, has been created with this mindset, where I am writing not with any kind of outcome in mind…