Poetry

Image from An Introduction to Poetry Week

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

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 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:

2024: 'Brixton Revisited; Brixton Remembered': a five-minute audio piece in the form of a second-person spoken word vignette-style text, commissioned by Art on the Underground

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

2010: 'No Time' in Dieffenthaller, I. & Harris, (Eds.) Sixty Poems for Haiti, Royston, commissioned by Cane Arrow Press, pp. 38-39

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