Kathy Pimlott

February 2026

​ 

For those like me who have long periods of no writing happening, I recommend having a listen to this very reassuring BBC Radio 3  programme, When the Words Leave  in which Caroline Bird talks with poets, including Marie Howe, Vanessa Kisuule, Liz Berry, Jack Underwood and Hannah Copley, to explore those times when it feels as if words have abandoned us. 

Ferreting among old poems in the hope of finding something,  I must say I still like the odd poems I've written to make myself laugh, poems which hardly ever see the light of day because I seldom submit them anywhere. Why? Because many, many of us. myself included, don't value 'light' or comic verse as we do those poems which get called necessary. But what could be more necessary when the world is going to shit than that most subversive of responses, laughter?

What makes me laugh might not be the same for you. I like sly, wry wit, overturned assumptions about what comes next, a sort of breezy refusal to be serious. It's particularly pleasing to me when it includes audacious rhyming. - Brian Bilston does this very well. Tony Hoagland, Peter Sansom, U.A. Fanthorpe and Wendy Cope, among others, are adept at weaving humour and sentiment, of course. Their verse is far from light. This year, I will try to take my light verse seriously and not be shy about it.

​I’m reading

Diane Seuss's Modern Poetry (Fitzcarraldo) and here's her deeply witty and true heartbreaker Romantic Poet