water beneath the world
poetry & interview: Martin Kennedy Yates
they sleep in sweet abandon – long pods of tamarind, tourmaline dragonflies, weathered stones by the stream. what stirred behind my eyelids was angular, a finite emptiness. it is softening, its corners rounding like the curves of a moon. I am learning to drink of surrender, to become its water beneath the world. Saraswati Nagpal
at the winged moon, we are halfway through our submission window for BIOPHILIA and eagerly reading the beauty wafting in through our submission form. for guidelines, read here. last week, our EIC Jai Michelle wrote beautifully of her experience reading submissions. for more of her sumptuous monthly writing, here’s a peek at her latest newsletter, exclusively for paid subscribers and including our submissions list.
this week, I’d like to introduce you to Martin Kennedy Yates, a poet whom Jai-Michelle and I admire greatly. his serene work was published in Hinterland this year. Martin’s poetry settles in the soul, a gentle unfolding of images, textured and tumbling softly from depth to depth. we hope you enjoy his work and his sage responses to our questions, paired below with vivid art by Izabella Ortiz.
DEVOTEE Martin Kennedy Yates First published in Finished Creatures, June 2022
The form of "Devotee" is inspired by ‘Bird in Space’ 1928, by the influential Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957).
Tell us a bit about yourself and your artistic process, why do you make art?
Creatively, I’d describe myself first and foremost as a poet – but more broadly as an artist, writer and educator. Going right back to my childhood, I loved to read & write, and make art. I also loved to experience nature through birdwatching, swimming and canoeing. I think I was always quite spiritual, too, searching for deeper truth and meaning, even as a child and adolescent. These loves and values have stayed with me through a few decades now, and they still underpin my ethos and creative practice today.
In 2013, having worked in education for about 25 years and only had time to treat writing and painting hobbies, I made the decision to go part-time in my teaching job. This allowed me to open up an art studio, then a few years later to begin an MA in Creative Writing. Following the MA, in 2022, I finally started to think of myself as a poet when I began to have poems accepted and published by some amazing magazines – The Rialto, Stand, Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, Magma, and others. In 2024, I decided to completely step away from my career in education, a little early, to focus fully on my writing and artistic practice. I promptly entered and won the Broken Spine Chapbook Competition, so my first pamphlet will be out with them in September 2025.
Why do I create? Because, increasingly, I must. My mind is more fertile than ever and I’m increasingly passionate about my writing and artistic pursuits. The responsibilities of life and demands of economic necessity have, for so long, been allowed to suppress my creativity. Now, this latent urge to create must have its way, and its day. This year has already brought along some amazing opportunities to write, collaborate and share my work with different audiences, but I’m hungry for more. These are exciting times for me as a poet, and a person. I’m achieving and realising so many things for the first time – leading workshops, headlining events, getting published, doing interviews, connecting and collaborating with other creatives. My biggest creative urge at the moment is to begin to combine my writing with my visual art practice. There are so many creative opportunities waiting to be explored!
What inspired the piece featured in our magazine?
The poem that I was pleased to have featured in the ‘Hinterland’ edition of The Winged Moon is simply entitled “Fabric” and it was inspired by a walk in a location near where I live. It’s a very ordinary place, somewhat run-down and far from inspiring in any conventional way. It’s very much an edgeland, a liminal space, where the urban and rural meet. That day I’d gone out looking for a poem, as it were – seeking something that would capture me and prompt me to respond. There was a small pool, very shallow, silted up and overgrown, but the neglected stillness of this place was appealing to me – it had the down-at-heel psycho-geographic resonance, and liminality, that I knew my imagination was looking for.
In that location, I had an intense encounter with the natural world, with the stillness of the water, the slight rustle of yellowing trees, the slow fall of the first few leaves of autumn. Then came imagination – a spiritual or mystical vision of a priest, wearing robes that echoed the colours of the trees, confessing his own sins before an altar. Then, as I came out of that vision, the wind increased a little causing the water to ripple to be a little troubled, and as a person of faith I was also unsettled and had a strong sense of my own frailty and human weakness which is reflected at the end of the poem.
This three-stage process is quite often a feature of how I encounter the world and turn experience into writing: first, intense observation and contemplation; followed by spiritual meditation and vision; leading to personal reflection and response. It’s not a formula or anything, and I’m not bound by any obligation to a recognisable process, but that’s quite often how it happens for me. In addition, the distinctive shape of the poem on the page reflects my belief in the poem as a ‘thing’ in its own right – somewhat like a painting. Not merely a means of expressing something, but also having its own ‘fabric’ and ‘texture’ as an artistic entity on the page, in the eye, the mouth, the ear and the imagination. FABRIC Martin Kennedy Yates First published in Hinterland, The Winged Moon, January 2025
What do you do to nourish your artistic talent?
I think being a poet takes patience. It does for me, anyway. So, I take time to cultivate the ability to contemplate, to give attention to things, to meditate and reflect deeply. I think this is a matter of respecting and showing love for the world that we write about and make paintings from – whether it’s what I’d call the natural or created order of things, or the human realm and the anthropocene. Being present and giving attention in both rural and urban environments is an important to me. I often experience this through walking, running and swimming in nature – but also through stopping to stand, sit, stare, listen, touch, smell, taste, to take things in and be taken in by the world.
More specifically, I view reading and listening to others’ work as an opportunity to learn and cultivate my own creative abilities. Any encounter with creative work is a chance to be inspired, influenced, informed and instructed, so I love going to readings, galleries, theatre, live music and anywhere where I can tap into others’ creativity. I’m currently enjoying collaborating with a musician, and also writing some poems inspired by two local glass artists and their work – just appreciating at their amazing work, watching them make it and hearing what they say about their work has been inspiring. In the future, I’d like to connect and collaborate more than I already do with other writers, artists and creatives.
As someone who has worked in education for a long time, I really value being taught and challenged by others. I get a lot out of workshops and courses. My financial resources are limited, so I’m very careful about what I choose and I’m always keen to create something specific afterwards that applies and develops what I’ve learnt or been inspired by.
What have you got coming up - any projects or publications we should look out for? I have my debut pamphlet coming out, with The Broken Spine, in September of this year. I was amazed and very pleased to win their chapbook competition towards the end of last year, and I’ve loved the process of formulating and editing the book. At first, I thought it would be like releasing an EP, but now it feels like a debut album – and I’m a big fan of the raw energy you often get in debut albums, so I hope it’s got some of that. It’s entitled, This Wilderness & Other Concerns and it consists of three sections – a long poem in five parts which is a centenary response to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; about a dozen shorter pieces many of which are concrete/visual poems; and four ‘Scousenlish’ poems in an invented/adapted language inspired by the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It also has a set of notes at the back detailing some of the references and allusions in the Eliot-inspired poem, which the nerd in me is very excited about! It has a great cover and some black and white photos inside, and has received some glowing endorsements from some amazing poets and academics, which has been very encouraging and humbling. So, yes, I’d love people to buy and enjoy my book when it’s out. I might be a bit biased, but I think you get quite a lot of bang for your buck – loads of varied forms, voices and themes in one little package. You’ll be able to get it via The Broken Spine website, or direct from me (with a complimentary hand-crafted bookmark) in person, or by getting in touch via the socials. You can also pre-order it with me by connecting via my socials below. I’d also love to get out and about and do some readings/performances of the poems, in various places. I’ve got some local ones planned or promised in Birmingham and West Midlands, but I’m happy to do a bit of travelling – so if you want to invite me to bring my little book and join an event you’re organising in your area, please do get in touch.
CHIAROSCURO Martin Kennedy Yates First published in Poetry Wales, March 2022
"Chiaroscuro" is written in response to R.S. Thomas’s poem, Dreaming, and themes explored in the poems published posthumously as the collection, Residues
Where can people find you? (Socials, links etc) If you’ve been interested in this piece, please do follow and connect with me via social media – I’m happy with direct messages too, so long as they’re not intrusive or weird! I’m most active on Instagram and Bluesky, and less so on Twitter/X. My new website is currently under construction, but I will be featuring on social media when it goes live, soon I hope. The handle Arc Creative Arts, which I use on Insta and X, is an umbrella identity for all my artistic endeavours: • https://www.instagram.com/arccreativearts/ • https://bsky.app/profile/martinkennedyyates.bsky.social • https://x.com/ArcCreativeArts
many thanks to Martin for sharing his inspiring vision, process, and poetry with us.
i must add that the saffron and cerise of Izabella’s beautiful artwork “Dreams” (also published in Hinterland) are a luscious vision of the passion of summer. we hope you, dear readers, are enjoying the brightness of your summer, and that your world is singing with inspiration for BIOPHILIA. we look forward to reading your work. submissions close on July 2nd!
thank you for joining us this week.
until next week…
Saraswati and Jai-Michelle
read about today’s artist here:
Izabella Ortiz’s mother is Australian and her father French-Colombian, as a child she lived in France, Australia and also in Alaska. Izabella’s painting unexpectedly came to life. One evening in 2009, like a sleepwalker she grabbed a painting she had at home and painted over it. Since then she has been producing compulsively… This "trance painting" loomed up after a lung illness and has become vital to Izabella. I have become what I am. All her paintings are "automatic" and therefore, take life directly on the paper: forms and materials whisper to me what to do...
What a lovely read. I will be asking our creative writing tutor to get in touch with Martin to come and give us a talk, hopefully. It’s left me wanting more!