Not About Now

In any time, the best way to do something for writers is to give them money. March 2020 was no ordinary time and we were already seeing the effects of lockdown on Writing Squad poets who were freelance, and especially on those who had just recently made that big step of beginning a freelance or portfolio career.

With help from Simon Armitage and the TS Eliot Foundation, we commissioned two poems from the poets who came to the mini-goals sessions we had just set up. They worked in pairs, editing and influencing each other. We left the brief open, and at a time when most commissions called for responses to the pandemic, our only instruction was that their poems didn’t have to be about now. 

The participating poets were Elizabeth Gibson, Emily Pritchard, Fahad Al-Amoudi, Gregory Kearns, Hannah Hodgson, Jasmine Simms, Jenny Danes, Jessica Wood, Kym Deyn, Laura Attridge, Lydia Allison, Nasim Rebecca Asl, Tife Kusoro, and Yasmin Roe.

The result was a print anthology, you can download a pdf version here.