Week 5 Poem of the Week: “Orange” by Anna Willmoth

Image credits: Keira Quirk

After reading this intriguing poem, we spoke to its writer, Anna, to get some more insight!

Anna introduces her poem as “procrastination from start to finish”: “I was trying to write a prac crit essay on deconstructionism and the theory was undoing anything I was writing as I wrote it. So, instead, I wrote a poem on bright orange paper that was in already broken down. It’s broken down in structure and in content, to the point where you might not even know how to read it, which allows the seemingly unfinished and unstructured space.”

She started writing poetry “sometime in 6^th form. I actually wrote one of my first favourites on a 04:46 train to a Cambridge English taster day in year 12. Nowadays I mainly write drama; there’s nothing like seeing someone perform your work, and it all coming together.”

Image credits: Keira Quirk

That said, she admits that she doesn’t write often. “During term, I write maybe an idea a fortnight? Usually they don’t transpire into anything though, so I was happy ‘Orange’ made it into a full poem. In my poetry, at the moment, I’m working on ideas of love as glitter, dead flies on the ceiling and what it is to whisper. Hopefully they’ll gradually get their poems.

“In the two and a half short plays I’ve written, there is always a ghost or imaginary figure central to the story, which I never consciously decided to do. I guess the idea of the imaginary/not-quite-real best representing or influencing the “actual” real is quite an interesting one.

“Often in my work, as my wife has pointed out, I use the love language of giving food or cups of tea. I’m not sure if ‘Orange’ is entering into that love language, if anything, it’s starved of it, but food is key.”

Image credits: Keira Quirk

As for her influences and favourite works, she lists a number: “The Waves, Virginia Woof. Hamlet, William Shakespeare. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne. I realise none of these are poems, but each I adore. I’m not sure any influence my writing, although all play with those ideas of the real and non-real. If anything, for ‘Orange’, the true influence was the idea of deconstructivism and simulacra (Baudrillard).

“I think a lot about what human beings are meant to experience, and I don’t think supermarkets are one of them, nor electric lights. This supermarket scenario is completely made up; neither this poem, nor supermarkets, nor modernity, nor the pricing of the orange, are real, really. It almost allows for the dissociation and disintegration that it hosts.”

She adds that she likes “short poems that stay with me. I want images I think of in real life, that bring points of joy to the mundane. Short and sweet.”

That’s a wrap for our Poem of the Week feature for this week – if you, too, would like to see an original poem of yours featured right here in The Tab, we would love to hear from you: submissions are open now, just email your poem to [email protected] (submission guidelines outlined in the original article here). We can’t wait to hear from you!

Feature image credits: Keira Quirk

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