Sometimes I will ‘finish’ a poem, but I won’t be totally satisfied with the result. Something feels off. Incomplete. Forced. Contrived. Or just not ‘me’. When this happens, I sleep on it – literally. I will save the poem and return to it the next day and take another go at it…

If you haven’t lost a loved one, it will be exceedingly hard to capture the complexities that such a loss would entail. Life is full of different emotional experiences, some of which will have happened to you. I’d advise, at least in the beginning, to focus your efforts there. This doesn’t mean you have to limit your poetry to those life events, but rather to using the emotions that you have experienced to inform and colour your work. With some introspection and imagination, you can extrapolate the emotional state that may arise from a more extreme version of a situation you have lived through…