Live Encounters Poets on Poetry July 2026
How does one become a poet? by Brian Kirk.
In my case it was a slow process. Looking back, I can see that it began long before I started writing. Standing out in the back yard on an evening as a small child, feeling the light fade and the day passing into night. It was a kind of unearned regret for the impermanence of things, a sense of the elegiac before I had lost anything or anyone of importance. Reading is important, of course. I remember the fascination I had with Old Testament bible stories as a child. There was poetry in them for sure. Later, at mass the Old Testament sat alongside the New and the dry text of the liturgy. As a child I was already discriminating, noting the shifts in register as the priest rattled on.
And there is ego involved also when the idea lands that, perhaps yes, I might write something. The first efforts are painfully bad, but that’s as it should be. It took me years to look outside myself, to the world, to the experiences of others, to find my way back to a truth about myself that might apply to the world as a whole. At some stage you begin to think of yourself as a poet, mainly because someone whose work you admire refers to you as a poet. But you must study and read. And then you must write and continue to write. That is the act that defines you.
© Brian Kirk
Brian Kirk has published two poetry collections with Salmon Poetry, After The Fall (2017) and Hare’s Breath (2023) and a fiction chapbook It’s Not Me It’s You (Southword Editions, 2019). His first novel Riverrun is forthcoming from Library Tales Publishing in late 2026.