
#213: Anthony Anaxagorou — Thinking Like a Poet, Pushing Past Self-Doubt, and Treating Rejection as Part of the Job (From The Vault)
Poet, publisher, and educator Anthony Anaxagorou on treating rejection as part of the job, pushing an idea to its edge without losing the reader, and ending a poem where it can keep travelling — a re-release of episode #012.
You'll learn:
- Why walking away from writing for years doesn't necessarily mean you ever left it.
- How to treat rejection as part of the job rather than a verdict on your worth.
- What happens to your work when one stamp of validation starts to feel like an entitlement.
- How a restless, never-satisfied mind can become a creative engine.
- A morning listening exercise, borrowed from Lydia Davis, that can hand you the first line of a poem.
- What to do when you're stuck on a line and the answer is sitting on your bookshelf.
- Why “accessible” is one of the most loaded words in poetry.
- How far to push an idea before you lose the reader.
- Two ways to take a flat, literal line and make it tell the truth slant.
- Why your poem probably starts later and ends earlier than you think, and what the reader does with the space you leave.
Resources & Links
- Original episode: #012 Anthony Anaxagorou — Push Past Self-Doubt and Think Like a Poet
- Anthony's website
- How to Write It
- After the Formalities
- Heritage Aesthetics
- Out-Spoken
- Out-Spoken Press
- “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” by Emily Dickinson
About Anthony Anaxagorou
Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere.
His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics (Granta Poetry, 2022), won the 2023 RSL Ondaatje Prize. His second collection, After the Formalities, was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and called a poetry book of the year by the Telegraph and Guardian. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction, and in 2023 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2012 Anthony set up one of London's leading poetry nights, Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night now held at London's Southbank Centre, and established Out-Spoken Press – a publishing house that looks to challenge the lack of diversity in British poetry publishing.
His craft book, How to Write It, was published by Penguin's #Merky Books in 2020.
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