My most recent experience at that time is sleep, and the wild irrationality and emotional defencelessness of dreams. This is when my imagination is most vivid and my intelligence sharpest. That part of writing is almost invariable and I’m happy about it. I’m not so happy at all with how often I manage to make time to sift, type out, revise, sift again, arrange, and share. Life always seems to get in the way of those parts of the process.
John Freeman is a prize-winning poet and critic whose work has appeared in magazines and anthologies over several decades. His most recent books are What Possessed Me (Worple Press), and Strata Smith and the Anthropocene (Knives Forks and Spoons Press), both published in 2016. Earlier collections include A Suite for Summer (Worple), White Wings: New and Selected Prose Poems (Contraband Books), Landscape with Portraits (Redbeck…
Two of my poems published in Issue Nine of The Lonely Crowd (May 2018) came from my collection The Way Out launched in October 2018. ‘Paris, December 25th’ and ‘Mount Ainos’ are both poems about journeys. The entire collection is structured as a journey in three separate parts; In, Through and Out. The journey leads to an ending that is also a point of departure, encouraging the reader to determine their own direction on from the text.
My poems often arrive at inconvenient moments; like the client who begins to tell their therapist about the abuse thirty seconds before the end of the session. They spill just before I have to leave for work, or while I’m driving, when a comment on the radio, an ambiguous billboard, causes me to pull over,…
Issue 9 of The Lonely Crowd features three new poems from Louise Warren, including ‘Walt’, which she discusses here. Don’t miss Louise reading these poems at our London event this Thursday. I have always loved the films of Walt Disney, especially the earlier ones. Fantasia, Pinocchio, the original One Hundred and One Dalmatians with its hand…
‘Write what you know.’ For many years it was advice that I tried to follow, a mantra so prevalent in creative writing teaching that it surely couldn’t be wrong. Except, of course, that it is. Or not wrong exactly, but misguided, and limited, and – more importantly – limiting. Taken to its logical conclusion, ‘Write…
Martina Evans grew up in County Cork and trained in Dublin as a radiographer before moving to London in 1988. She is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose. Bernard O’Donaghue has described her new book, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, as ‘a remarkable document, a major work’. Here, our Editor, John Lavin, talks to…