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JAN BRIERTON “I did have to write one on the back
of a toilet I w roll once. oke up in the middle of the night with this line going through my head. I didn’t want to wake my husband, and I knew I had a pen but I didn’t have any paper, so I snuck into the bathroom. If I don’t write them down they’re gone and I just have to move on.” Jan Brierton’s poems are honest, candid and often hilarious, and from an opening gambit that went viral in 2021, has seen her work find a huge audience. Since that accidental notoriety, the intervening years have seen her publish a book four months after her first Instagram prose, launch a podcast (currently on hiatus) and compose a second collection. “The first poem came in January 2021, I’d never really written before. I just wrote how I was feeling, we were going into lockdown part three at this stage, everyone had had their “meaningful Christmas” and was starting to get cooped up at home again, and I had this rhythm of frustration. I use bad language in my day to day expression, and the first poem came from that.” Named after that first poem, her first book immediately struck a chord the world over, with wry, clever observations one might be forced to endure in the endless static of the pandemic. What Day Is It? Who Gives A Fuck! was The accidental poet. WORDS Adhamh Ó Caoimh PHOTO Lorna Fitzsimons 24 born of all that frustration. I shared it with some friends on social media and it ended up going sort of viral. A lot of people over the world were feeling exactly the same as me, and once I started writing I couldn’t stop. From that came the first collection, which was quickly published by New Island Books. Folks were calling it a book of lockdown poems. What has inspired you in the composition of this new collection? ‘Everybody is a Poem’ is me now, as a forty eight year old, middle aged woman with two kids and lots of frustration, but there’s a bit of love in there as well. A plain kind of love. And some pieces about grief and mental health too. That’s the lovely thing about the poems. I’m finding a lot of people are relating to it, telling me “That’s me. I’m that one about the fog.” It’s lovely that people are relating to it. In the short years between What Day Is It?... and Everybody is a Poem, what’s changed for you as a writer? Your first book having been written with no expectation, whereas this one had an audience anticipating it. This one was very different. For the first book, everything happened very organically. I was writing without consequence, just putting my stuff out there, so this is the “difficult second album”, I suppose. The intention is there, now. When I’m writing a poem, I know that’s what I’m doing to express a particular feeling that I’m having or observing. I still work in fashion, more on the modeling development side of things these days. And when the first book came out, I would have been embarrassed if someone introduced me as ‘Jan the Poet’. Whereas now I maybe feel a little bit more comfortable with saying that I write poems. The intention is much more realized now. It still feels a bit accidental. It feels different, because I’m putting myself out there in a way I didn’t acknowledge or realize in the first instance. It was this gorgeous opportunity that came, and I took it and just went with it, and much to my surprise people liked it. It’s a bit like having a second child. You get them to a certain and you might think “that was grand.” So here I am with the second book. How do your poems start? Is it a line, or an idea? A rhyming scheme or accidental inspiration? Is there a structure to what you do before you put it on the page? Sometimes it’s a line, sometimes it’s two. I’m still learning as I go, about my process, about how I write. Sometimes what I’ve found it’s the last two lines that come to me, and I’ll build the poem in a way that I find my way to them. Sometimes it’s the first two lines,