Erin Bedford : part five

How does a poem begin?

With yearning.

Erin Bedford : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Very. I started paying close attention to phrasing and wordplay when I listened to music as a teenager and the singer-songwriters I usually listened to made me realize words didn’t have to be put together logically or rationally to make very real statements. Now, I almost always use music as assisted-entry into the particular emotions I need to write poetry.

Erin Bedford : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

The feelings that inspired it go slack. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it is publishable, or even complete. Which does mean some of my completed/published poems will probably never seem “finished” to me because I do feel like I could climb back into that exact emotional place and write differently or more.

 

Erin Bedford : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

My first serious engagement with poetry happened during my early twenties when the man who would turn out to be my writing muse for fifteen years quoted Yeats’ Easter, 1916 in a letter he wrote to me. I still wonder, if a person I was not in unrequited love with had done so, would I have fallen for poetry the same?
 

Erin Bedford : part one

Erin Bedford's work is published in William Patterson University's Map Literary, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Temz Review and Train: a poetry journal. She attended and won a Certificate of Distinction for her novel Fathom Lines from the Humber School for Writers. Currently, she is acting as shill for her newly-completed second novel, Illumining, and her manuscript of poetry. Follow her to find out more @ErinLBedford

What are you working on?

As is the case with most writers, I am always working on getting previously-written work published. The first is a novel set in York in the early nineteenth century. The second is a complete manuscript of poems that explore human relationships through hendiadys. For all who aren’t total word nerds, hendiadys is a figure of speech that makes use of conjunction (and) to allow two words to unify as a single concept without using one to modify or subordinate the other. 

I am also writing new poems and working on an essay about my experience of getting a massage from my ex-husband’s new girlfriend.