Enter our 2020 poetry competition
During the last lockdown, there were times when I felt a little anxious, a little lonely, but I was never bored. I had the world’s greatest home entertainment system: a blank page. In difficult times, I’ve always found poetry an escape. The page becomes a friend, a foil, a maze, a confessional booth.
It’s a creative outlet that’s open to anyone, which is why we’re launching a poetry competition for our readers. We’re looking for the best poem of under 40 lines, on the theme of “lockdown” – and feel free to interpret that theme as broadly as you like. Entries need to be submitted via telegraph.co.uk/poetrycompetition, or via post to: Poetry Desk, Telegraph Media Group, 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT. The winner will be published in The Daily Telegraph (T&CS below).
The current lockdown might have scuppered your holiday plans, but pick up a pen and the world is at your fingertips. You can make a whole landscape in your mind, as the self-isolating Emily Dickinson knew:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
To make a poem, meanwhile, all it takes is pen and ink, or a computer, or, if you’re insufferably pretentious, a typewriter (mine’s a Remington Remette). Or none of the above: the poet Helen Mort composes her first drafts in her head while jogging.
I’m not much of a jogger, but fortunately poetry is also a fantastic excuse for lazing about. You’re not doing nothing, you’re thinking up a poem. Just look at Coleridge – there he is sat by a fire, smoking a pipe and (so it seems) doing precisely sod all. Ah, but no! He’s attending closely to that pipe, observing the coals in the fireplace, and from them conjuring ghostly visions:
The poet in his lone yet genial hour Gives to his eyes a magnifying power:
Or rather he emancipates his eyes From the black shapeless accidents of size –
In unctuous cones of kindling coal, Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe’s trim bole,
His gifted ken can see Phantoms of sublimity.
Many of the poems I wrote in the spring will be appearing in an anthology called New Poetries VIII. I was asked to explain how they were written, which left me a little uneasy: I wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed to know how to write a poem, least of all myself. Each poem is a fresh beginning. But here are five tips that have sometimes proved helpful: