Hello again everyone,

Hope you’re keeping safe and healthy in these scary times. I’m writing today to share some brand new poetry!

One of the ways I’ve been surviving this crisis is by creating new work. This April, the I Am Loud productions team are doing National Poetry Writing Month (#NaPoWriMo), in which people challenge themselves to write a new poem every day. For me, this couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s meant I give myself permission on a daily basis to think, to create, to process what’s happening around me. And with everything chaotic and constantly shifting, that’s helping to keep me sane. If you feel that writing poetry could help you do the same, join in! We’re posting daily prompts and encouragement on our Instagram stories (@iamloudpro).

A very important disclaimer: IT IS 100% OK if you are not using the lockdown to develop skills, make new art, get buff, or whatever else. This is an incredibly stressful time. If creating helps you through it, as it’s helping me, that’s great! But if you need to curl up in your duvet and get through this minute by minute, that’s also completely legitimate. We’re in a global pandemic: there’s no need to add any more stress to your life. Find what works best for you!

So, I’m going to share three of the pieces I’ve written so far. Day 1’s poem is tentatively titled ‘Social Distancing’ and was drafted while standing in a queue (with people spaced 2m apart) outside Tesco.

Day 2’s poem was inspired by a prompt posted by Apples & Snakes to start a poem with the line “My taste for rain has changed.” I began there, drafted the piece, then went back in and changed the first line.

I’ve not publicly shared my Day 3 poem as it’s a bit personal, but here’s my Day 4 poem! Loud Poets are using the letters of the alphabet for our daily prompts, so today I riffed off the letter D. I had to finish it in the morning quite quickly, so it’s a wee sketch of a piece in which I played with alliteration and assonance.

Hope you enjoyed those! If you’re interested in hearing more NaPoWriMo poetry, tune in to our weekly podcast in which we share work and talk about how our writing is going. The first episode is below and the second episode will be out tomorrow (Sunday 5th April).

I have one more poem to share. I Am Loud is also doing a new project called Return to Form in which we pair up two poets and challenge them to write a new piece using the same poetic form and inspirational material. Mark Gallie and I created erasure poems from the first three paragraphs of H. G. Wells’ classic 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. It was a great exercise – I’d never tried erasure poetry before and I learned a lot working on it. Check out what we came up with below and try making your own!

Thank you so much to everyone who bought my book and tipped me on Ko-Fi after my last post: your support means the world, particularly right now in all of this precarity. Unfortunately the online shop that I sell through is now closed, so I’m not able to ship out books at the moment. But if you’ve enjoyed the poems I shared today and want to buy me a virtual coffee, that would be amazing! Here’s the link. And if you want to support what I Am Loud Productions does, including creating more of these videos, please do pledge to us on Patreon – our patrons are providing necessary income keeping us going right now. Thank you so much!

Wishing you all love, calm, and poetry. K