Mushmen Productions

Up and to my office, where all the morning doing business, and at noon home to dinner, and then up to remove my chest and clothes up stairs to my new wardrobe, that I may have all my things above where I lie, and so by coach abroad with my wife, leaving her at my Lord’s till I went to the Tangier Committee, where very good discourse concerning the Articles of peace to be continued with Guyland, and thence took up my wife, and with her to her tailor’s, and then to the Exchange and to several places, and so home and to my office, where doing some business, and then home to supper and to bed.

at noon I move
to my new war

that I may have
my thin lie still

I commit every discourse
concerning peace

tin wit with her tail
doing me in

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 16 October 1663.

Up, I bless God being now in pretty good condition, but cannot come to make natural stools yet; and going to enjoy my wife this morning, I had a very great pain in the end of my yard when my yard was stiff, as if I strained some nerve or vein, which was great pain to me.
So up and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and at noon dined at home, my head full of business, and after stepping abroad to buy a thing or two, compasses and snuffers for my wife, I returned to my office and there mighty busy till it was late, and so home well contented with the business that I had done this afternoon, and so to supper and to bed.

I cannot make a tool
to enjoy this morning

trained on a head
full of compasses

if I turn it on
it is afternoon

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 15 October 1663.

“If  I’m part of that group, I cry” — Ariel Yelen

7.

Perennial scrutiny of fog 
over the hills. Here, American
officials can dress like they did
"back home" and not stew

in their own sweat, like  
they would in the lowlands:
long, double-breasted frock coats, 
white dress shirts, silk top hats.

A cravat and a stickpin. Wives
in billowing dark linen skirts. Even 
lower-level employees wear 
three-piece sack suits: boxy 

jacket, waistcoat, slim-cut 
trousers. For Thanksgving, turkeys 
and cranberries shipped from the United 
States are unloaded at the docks 

in Manila, then carried on the backs 
of mules or native porters. Up the muddy 
mountain trails lined with fern, the purr
of buttonquail zigzagging in the grass.

 

Up and to my office, where all the morning, and part of it Sir J. Minnes spent, as he do every thing else, like a fool, reading the Anatomy of the body to me, but so sillily as to the making of me understand any thing that I was weary of him, and so I toward the ‘Change and met with Mr. Grant, and he and I to the Coffee-house, where I understand by him that Sir W. Petty and his vessel are coming, and the King intends to go to Portsmouth to meet it. Thence home and after dinner my wife and I, by Mr. Rawlinson’s conduct, to the Jewish Synagogue: where the men and boys in their vayles, and the women behind a lattice out of sight; and some things stand up, which I believe is their Law, in a press to which all coming in do bow; and at the putting on their vayles do say something, to which others that hear him do cry Amen, and the party do kiss his vayle. Their service all in a singing way, and in Hebrew. And anon their Laws that they take out of the press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another; and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, I cannot tell, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing. And in the end they had a prayer for the King, which they pronounced his name in Portugall; but the prayer, like the rest, in Hebrew. But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this. Away thence with my mind strongly disturbed with them, by coach and set down my wife in Westminster Hall, and I to White Hall, and there the Tangier Committee met, but the Duke and the Africa Committee meeting in our room, Sir G. Carteret; Sir W. Compton, Mr. Coventry, Sir W. Rider, Cuttance and myself met in another room, with chairs set in form but no table, and there we had very fine discourses of the business of the fitness to keep Sally, and also of the terms of our King’s paying the Portugees that deserted their house at Tangier, which did much please me, and so to fetch my wife, and so to the New Exchange about her things, and called at Thomas Pepys the turner’s and bought something there, and so home to supper and to bed, after I had been a good while with Sir W. Pen, railing and speaking freely our minds against Sir W. Batten and Sir J. Minnes, but no more than the folly of one and the knavery of the other do deserve.

all the anatomy
of the body out of sight

to the kiss the press
the every desire singing

but like people knowing
the true God

we imagine a whole world
absurdly set down in our room

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 14 October 1663. Unchanged from the first draft except for the arrangement of lines, in part because the Australian filmmaker Marie Craven made an excellent videopoem out of it.

“& your laugh like an ambulance, / & your laugh like the elephant grass.” — Jenny Browne

6.

Eight beds under thatched roofs.
Three cottages making up the early
sanatorium. A health-restoring station

for convalescing soldiers. OBJECT NUMBER 
12-61-70/10861.1.4380 in Harvard's Peabody 
Museum shows a wraparound porch or veranda, 

houseposts raised at least four feet from the ground 
and cut from rough timber. The print is black and white 
adhered to paperboard, but in the foreground,  

the unmistakable tint of mossy green. Panoramic 
views of the hills, including the one seen in OBJECT 
NUMBER 12-61-70/10861.1.4380 listed as 

Burying ground for Baguio / Igorots of Baguio, Benguet.

“I do not know how to hold all // the beauty and sorrow of my life.” — Cynthia Zarin

Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed that one of our judges for the 2026 National Poetry Competition, Luke Kennard, has been popping up elsewhere in the literary news of late, because his hilarious novel Black Bag, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. We asked Luke how he is balancing life as a poet and novelist, and, more importantly, what’s likely to catch his eye when judging the competition. Budding poets take note that the entry window closes at midnight on Saturday 31 October! Find all the details you need to enter here.

Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist who lives in the West Midlands. His sixth collection, Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward Prize in 2021. He is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Birmingham. In 2014, he was named one of the ‘Next Generation Poets’ by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list.

How much permeability is there between developing your craft as a poet and as a novelist? Is there anything that working on novels has taught you about writing poetry, or vice versa?
This was the first novel I’ve written where I felt like I could channel some of the energy I have when I’m writing poetry: first-person, ill-tempered, self-sabotaging… and then trying to play a tune on the weird instrument I’ve cobbled together. My poetry tends towards quite narrative stuff anyway, so it’s probably just that you develop a desire for emotional precision, the more idiosyncratic the better, which feels applicable to both. 

Is there anything you wish you could do while writing a novel that only really works in a poem?
I get bored easily, so staying consistent in a novel and remembering you can’t just go haring down every tangent (every hare-hole?) is challenging for me. But I have this excess energy and I go completely spare if I’m not writing. Eventually you find a way of using your compulsions. I like that a poem can just pick you up and set you down somewhere else. And I like the way poems can deal with something subtle like ‘ambivalence’ and make it really sing (I’ve just been teaching Carl Phillips’ poem ‘Holy Places’ so this is on my mind). 

What are you looking for in a poem? What will make you stop and linger on an entry as you go through the submissions?
Really just a clear love of language and phrasing. Some striking imagery. But I have very catholic tastes in poetry (as in broad, and contradictory) so it’s mainly a case of that feeling that something’s at stake for the writer (and therefore the reader) in whatever way that manifests. 

Any favourites from the competition’s history?
I always look forward to reading the choices and I think it’s been a great decade. I love the fact that the National Poetry Competiton is anonymised and it’s literally just you and the poems and a dozen cups of tea per session. Eric Yip and Fiona Larkin’s winning poems are among my faves. 

Find more inspiration and resources to help you with your entry in our competition pages. Visit the National Poetry Competion site to enter and contact us support@poetrysociety.org.uk if you have any questions not answered in our helpful FAQs.