A beautiful compulsion

National Poetry Writing Month - and the Wells Open Poetry Competition.

It’s been too long since the last post. In late March, I posted an article on writing blurbs, which is still waiting for its Part 2. But true to our usual form, both Kim and I have been taken up with this year’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) – which involves writing a poem a day throughout the month of April. Many sensible people write these in the privacy of their own homes, perhaps sharing them with a few trusted friends, before eventually - after careful consideration and thorough editing - publishing a handful of their 30 poems.

But Kim and I publish them every single day on social media, often within minutes of writing the final lines. It’s incredibly exposing, exhausting – and beautifully compelling. And by mid-April, it tends to become all-consuming. By the end of the month, I’m exhausted and slightly crazed, but I do have a stock of 30 first, second or third drafts to sustain me through the subsequent months. Out of the 30 poems, there’s often a small selection of good poems which might make it into a collection. But perhaps most importantly, NaPoWriMo, and its crazy discipline, reminds me that I am a writer. That whatever else I’m doing or feelings in my life, the practice of writing is at my core. Like my therapist said - “whenever you talk about writing, your face lights up”. I’m still struggling with cyclical depression, and the practice of daily writing is a powerful reminder that on those days when I feel like I really don’t want to write a single word, I sometimes produce my best work.

In March 2025, Kim wrote a fabulous article about her experience of NaPoWriMo (which you can read it in full here): “you are writing past yourself, exceeding yourself and what you might usually do, because there are friends and acquaintances writing alongside you, egging you on, and sometimes you follow them onto different routes, or you write faster and further than you’ve done before, and you grumble whilst doing it, and complain but you do it anyway, because everyone else is doing it”.

As usual, I’m writing alongside Kim this year – and you can follow our progress and our daily poems on Facebook. On Saturday April 25th at 7pm, we’ll lead an evening workshop for our paying subscribers in which we’ll use additional readings and exercises to work with and around the NaPoWriMo prompt for that day.

Meanwhile, the ravenous demands of normal life continue. I began to write a list of the things I’ve been done in the three weeks since that post – workshops, meetings, readings, collaborations, competitions, applications, launches and more – but instead, I’ve decided to focus on just one: the launch of Wells Open Poetry Competition.

For a tiny city – just 11, 000 inhabitants – Wells has punched above its weight since 1992, when its multi-day Festival of Literature first opened. This year it takes place on the 16^th-24^th October, and looking at the list of readers over the last three years including Sebastian Faulkes, Prue Leith, Shami Chakrabarti, Robin Ince – it features everyone from huge household names to up-and-coming, emerging writers and poets. It’s often those writers I’m most excited by, so I was thrilled to judge the Young Poets Competition in 2024.

In a previous article on judging poetry competitions – “How to Pick a Winner” – I talked about the golden buzzer poems: those poems which, from the outset, you know will make the final stages of selection. I found one in Sylvan Restarick’s “ode to the dent you left in the sofa cushions”.

Every time I judge a poetry competition, I offer written feedback to everyone who made it onto the shortlist; even, sometimes, to everyone on the longlist. This is an important element of the judging process for me: clarifying my own thoughts; making the judging process as transparent as I can; whilst showing my respect and gratitude to those entrants who have been brave and generous enough to submit their work to my judgement. This is what I said to Sylvan:

“This is a hugely accomplished poem, yet it manages to look effortless. Whilst it appears casual, the images are wonderfully evocative. Knowing and reflective, it captures desire, pain and a sort of maddening insight and self-knowledge. . The story feels compellingly real on the page … so that by the end of the poem, the story of Achilles and Patroclus feels entirely fitting, and entirely proportionate to the tragedy of the situation and how powerfully and beautifully it is evoked. Just fantastic.”

Two years later, I still think it’s fantastic. And Sylvan was just 16 when he wrote it. If the young poets are producing work as word-perfectly powerful as this, then what can we expect in the Open Poetry Competition? Well, look at John Gallas’ breathtaking winning entry in 2023:

horsebreezes

each earlymorning Tui Spence
parked at the coldshade end of River Loop
& walked the 2 miles along Brethers Fence
where the giant horses grazed by the waters edge

dapplegrey percherons high-eyed as oaks
they daily upped & followed Tui Spence along the wire
together into the furtherwidening light
their gentle walk a thunder

downalong the plashy untreed bank
wind ever ruffled the rivertop
& the four pied massy drays
with halfshut eyes
snorted at their exercise
tress-manes snapping longheads atoss

like the happy mysteries of the moon
the radio the buried bulb
the breathing heart & the risen loaf
the quiet cause
of likely laws
remained by choice unlearned by Tui Spence

who could not but like to think
that all the morning spin & stream
down Brethers Fence
the trumpet-light the tattering sedge
the sun-hoovered frost & the chopswash tide

had something to do
with the beasts that walked beside

So I am absolutely delighted to return to the festival this year as the judge of the Open Poetry Competition, joining a list of former judges which includes Gillian Clarke, Jo Shapcott and Anthony Joseph. The competition is open for submissions now, and the cost of entry will support not just the festival but also its year-round work with over 50 schools throughout Somerset. There’s also special prize for local poets, and I got a strangely beautiful kick to my poetry guts when I read this painfully beautiful 2022 Highly Commended entry from my friend, the always-and-forever-missed Kathryn Bevis:

Living Grief

We Google it. Laid on our backs in bed together, cursed by our tired, three-pound brains, we search our phones’ blue light for wisdom, voyeurs of YouTube clips on other creatures’ pain. For seventeen days, a mourning orca attends her dead son’s corpse. She sinks and hauls the weight of him as if to fetch the breath back, have him suckle once again. A chimp will carry her lifeless child for months. She lets the troop draw close to hold her, hear her screech. They watch her comb the straw from listless fur and floss with grass between its teeth. Elephants know to sniff beloved bones. They seek to raise the fallen, rock their own bulk back and forth. Each one waits its turn to stroke and roll the skull, slow blow through its trunk, take time to bury its dead. Like us, giraffes and housecats, dingoes, horses, dogs forget to forage, forgo sex and sleep. Like us, at burial mounds, they pace and yowl and keen. So why should it surprise us, sweetheart, – us who matter most to one another, us whose marriage is as deep as marrow – why is this loss unthinkable: me without you, you without me?

NaPoWriMo will, inevitably, gives rise to a lot of poems which won’t make the shortlist. But each of those poems comes from the same beautiful compulsion which led Sylvan, John and Kathryn to craft these astonishing, enduring works of art. Write and publish a poem every day for thirty days, and you become intimate with all of the colours and flavours of that compulsion. And inevitably, you’ll produce work which you never expected or planned, poetry which catches the light and shines it back on you and this beautiful, broken world.

And maybe you’ll submit them to this, or another competition. You can submit your poems now via this link. If you make it onto the short list, you’ll be invited to attend a celebratory event at 2pm on 19 October 2026 at Cedars Hall in Wells where you’ll be publicly recognised, and where the winners of the Poetry and Prose competitions will receive prizes totalling £5,000 between them. Submissions are open till 30^th June.

Paying subscribers - we’ll be in touch shortly with your link for Saturday 25th, and with details of our May and June events which include an exclusive Shaw&Moore launch of Kim’s new collection: “The House of Broken Things”. In the meantime, I’m wishing you a happy, healthy April!