Free Thinking - A Writer's Emotions

Raymond’s first full-length poetry collection ‘The Perseverance’ was published last year to great acclaim – and has just won The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. One of the judges, Linton Kwesi Johnson, described it as ‘the most engaging collection of poems we have read in a long time’. ‘The Perseverance’ (Penned in the Margins) has also been shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Jhalak Prize. Raymond performs two new poems, written for The Verb, one of which explores loneliness as part of the emotional journey of writing a poem, and the remarkable ‘brazen’ sound of birds in New Zealand. The second poem which Raymond performs celebrates the sounds of word like ‘elegancies’, ‘ravish’, ‘fragment’ and ‘enthrall’ and their ‘possible energies’.

Tara writes two new poems especially for our emotional Verb, inspired by the challenges of beginning the process of writing. She explains to Ian why she enjoyed slipping a reference to the song ‘Molly Malone’ into her poem ‘Quartz’ and explains why she finds inspiration in the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky’s comment that “each deficiency may become a creative force of high quality”. Tara’s latest collection ‘The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx’ (Carcanet) was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize.

Aidan and Hubby (R.M.Hubbert) have been collaborating on the album ‘Here Lies the Body’ ( Rock Action Records) which came out last year, so we asked them to write us a song exploring the emotions of their writing process. The result is ‘Song on Song’ which marries Aidan’s sense that it is impossible to show the true self in lyrics, that we are ‘all liars’ - with Hubby’s insistent, repetitive guitar accompaniment, evoking the process of drafting and redrafting. Aidan continues to perform with his band Arab Strap, and Hubby is working on a solo album.

Denise finds joy in beginning to write novels, and loves the sense that her own world suddenly feels enlarged. For The Verb she writes a diary of two weeks in March when she started her new novel, a work-in-progress provisionally called ‘A Minor Murder’. Along the way we discover that she delights in working out which Justin Bieber song would have been important to her main character, that being angry can make it easier to write, and the pleasure she feels when a piece of writing just ‘fall out of your hands’. Denise has won many awards, including the McIllvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year, and The Gordon Burn prize for ‘The Long Drop’ and has been described by The Telegraph as ‘the woman who may be Britain’s finest living crime novelist’.