Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Writing and Journalism at Falmouth University, the editor of Stride magazine, and a contributing editor to international times. He has edited several anthologies of poetry and writing, such as Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos for Salt; and has many books of poetry and prose poetry in print, including Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017), as well as Encouraging Signs, a book of interviews, essays and conversations. His critical writing has been published in Journal of Visual Arts Culture, Revenant, English, Great Writing and Punk & Post-Punk.

Process, remix, juxtaposition, assemblage and selection

How the 21st century poet makes poetry out of autobiographical material

I write about the world and my experience of it by sieving an overload of information and textual material, heard, observed, read and seen. Through selection, editing and re-ordering I assemble narratives that try to make meaning of the world around me and my progression through it. My poems and prose-poems are fictions, there is little sense of ‘personal truth’ or ‘actual experience’ within them, yet their fast-moving and flickering structures seem to approximate how we live today, the effect of being awash in a confusing world where we collaborate with ‘friends’ on the other side of the word but do not know our neighbours. This paper is in part written using the same techniques as my poetry.