Featured Poet
Myra Schneider
Myra Schneider
My journey ‘into poetry’ took many years. I began writing when I was about eight – plays which my sister and I acted for the grown ups. I used to read poems in books of poetry for children and at first I liked them most for their sound. Sometimes I read them aloud:
‘I remember, remember/The house where I was born*.’
Then I started writing poems which were very
bad! At school in Scotland, when I was eleven, our teacher read us The Ancient Mariner. She told us she didn’t like it but I was mesmerized by the haunting story, the rhythm and the images. In secondary school I was fired by Wordsworth, Keats, Gerard Manley-Hopkins, also T.S. Eliot and the poets of World War One, especially Wilfrid Owen. I wrote poetry mainly about nature.
At London University I fell under the spell of Chaucer and also Anglo-Saxon poetry and wrote my own translation of The Seafarer. This was published in Bedford College magazine which I edited in my third year. When I left university I was allowed to join a group which included a number of well-known poets but it was very male-orientated and many of the poems they wrote and discussed seemed to me pretentious. There wasn’t a wide-ranging poetry scene with many workshops as there is now and after a couple of years I left the group and, disillusioned, stopped writing poetry altogether.
For about seven years I wrote novels mostly based on personal experience – they weren’t very good. In fact it was only when my small son started asking me for stories and I tried writing short stories and then novels for children that some real discipline came into my writing. The third novel, Marigold's Monster, was published by Heinemann and this was followed by two commissioned novels for teenagers.
By this time, towards the end of the 1970s, I was writing poems again and after a while I had one or two accepted by magazines. Then library spending was cut and I couldn’t place any more children’s novels which I found very depressing. I began to focus more on writing poetry and after four years when I’d had about twenty-five published I put together a collection. At this point I was lucky enough to be told by a magazine editor that John Killick, who was starting the Littlewood Press, liked my work. I sent him my manuscript and this was the base for Fistful of Yellow Hope which John published about a year later. Not long after this I realized poetry, not fiction, was my real metier. However, my interest in voice and narrative has remained and I often make use of both in writing poetry.
Those poets I absorbed in my teens have profoundly influenced my poetic vision. Since I started writing poetry seriously I have been excited by the language, syntax and ideas of many recent and contemporary poets: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Anne Stevenson, Les Murray, Mimi Khalvati, Anne Clusenaar, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop and Mark Doty. I am particularly aware of being influenced by the expansiveness of many American poets.
What would I say to people trying to get started? It is crucial to understand that writing poetry requires craft as well as inspiration and that the generation of a poem is usually a slow process. Reading is essential: different kinds of poetry and reading in depth. It is also important to get feedback from a skilled practitioner whom you feel you can trust.
Myra Schneider's new collection, Circling The Core, (Enitharmon Press, autumn 2008) opens with a sequence inspired by one of Barbara Hepworth's sculptures and explores the idea of core from different angles.
*Thomas Hood
Page(s) 40-41
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The