Poetry

Image from An Introduction to Poetry Week

Nicole's introduction to poetry evolved in 1995 after being inspired by a Birkbeck College Black Women's Writing Course. All this academic writing was fine but Nicole felt motivated to have a go at creative writing of her own.

Nicole discovered that poetry came in such vast shapes, forms and sizes.  She fell in love with the elements of poetic rhythms; the voice, expression of feeling, use of imagination, thinking in images, dreaming and associating – all these aspects of creating poems was enough to find herself waking at 3 am to capture her first poem, 'Colourless Entity'.

Nicole is enthusiastic about poetry because it is both free and deeply structured. There is a certain kind of freedom that comes from writing a poem without ending punctuation, or by playing with sentence fragments. There is also the joy that comes from operating within the constraints of poetry's unique structures from haiku to sonnets to ballads to cinquains to odes.

In 2013, Nicole set herself the challenge of writing 30 poems in 30 days in the month of April as part of National Poetry Writing Month. Here is one below from that collection called Skin.  All 30 can be read on her Shangwe2011 blog (link on the right).

Skin, a poem

Related Post:

Poetry What's the Point, an intimate talk between Benjamin Zephaniah and friends.

Published Poetry

Commissioned:

2014: 'Disappearing Act' in 7 Shades of Love: a collection of poems written by women and men globally, Daniella Blechner, (Ed.)

2010: 'No Time' in Sixty Poems for Haiti, Cane Arrow Press

In Poetry Today Anthologies:

2000: 'Energy' in Dreams and Desires

2000: 'High Spirits' in The Passage of Life

1997: 'Silent Moments' in Life Lines
1997: 'Colourless Entity' in Word of Mouth