Authors Electric

  I first came across Jo bell when she compiled 52 Poems, a book designed to help and encourage the writing of a poem a week. It lifted me out of a long fallow period and got me writing again. The content was so helpful that many of the poems in my first collection, Passing Places, owe   their origins to it. Lately, Jo has devised the Poetic Licence, an online group of aspiring poets who receive prompts, links, ideas, interviews with poets – all sorts of glorious stuff from her, every month. The idea is to build a community of poets. We can share work and feed back to each other if we want to. It’s the best thing I’ve come across to get the creative juices flowing and the community is full of amazing people. Here's a thing from the August prompt, which is about poems as games: COD/RT Is a game the same as a puzzle? COD1023last COD676L57 COD673L13 COD530IL4 COD307L 4from end COD598last para!   Could this   be called   a poem? RT3...

  April is NaPoWriMo, meaning write a poem a day. I can’t do it. There’s something about the conveyor-belt approach that sends me into a blind panic. Ideas don’t come to order, even with a prompt, and drafting and redrafting can take a long time and much thought. Years ago I was commissioned to write poems for BBC Active, for a very, very pernickety editor (sorry, Jayne) and we went, if I remember, to about 12 drafts for one poem. I loved it. I loved the challenge of revisiting something I thought was fine and working to make it finer – to fit the exacting brief. More recently, I bought a copy of 52 Poems, based on the idea of a poem a week, but the live challenge was over by then so I was able to work through the book at my own pace. It was full of excellent contributions from Jo Bell and other poets and not at all prescriptive.     In contrast, the publishing world is full of poetry ‘courses’ with headings such as ‘write about something you lost’, ‘write about somethi...