Peter Daniels (pictured right) wrote Shoreditch Orchid, the poem which won both the first prize and the Ted Hughes Environmental Poetry Prize in 2008.

1. What inspired you to write Shoreditch Orchid?

It was the experience of the bus journey behind the lamp post replacement operatives, combined with a feeling that there ought to be a Shoreditch Orchid as a spirit of place - something like the Camberwell Beauty butterfly. This was back in 1994 - Shoreditch wasn't quite what it is now, but you could see that coming. Originally Shoreditch Orchid was a character, rather implicated in the arty gentrification process - I had her "head full of Schubert / trotting to the deli for salami / and sundried tomatoes" but I cut out that aspect altogether. The orchid has much more to do with the longer term change that will one day take Shoreditch back to nature.

2. What were you hoping to say through it? Why did you choose the form you did?

I didn't start off hoping to say anything in particular, and there's something about a poem that has to choose its own form. It's more a process of discovering what I'm saying, and when the poem has its right words in the right form, I know I've got there. But it can take a few years.

3. Why did you enter the Arvon Poetry Competition?

Reminding myself after several years that I'd got poems that needed sending out. Competitions are useful if you can't think where else to send them, and occasionally they come up trumps.

4. What does Arvon mean to you?

Several weeks at Arvon centres, one completely mad, all of them stimulating, and lovely places to be.

5. Why did you start writing poetry?

I don't know the answer to that. I'm the kind of person that wants to use words to delight as well as communicate.

6. What sort of poetry or poets inspire you, do you have any topics/themes that you always return to in your work?

I grew up with plenty of verse as child, especially nonsense like Lear and Carroll, and my teenage passions were Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Bob Dylan and Captain Beefheart. It still sounds pretty adolescent to put them together like that, but those four are all very deep inside my self by now. The Penguin Poetry of the Thirties was an A Level set book, and growing up in Birmingham I was attracted by MacNeice's having lived there. I followed him rather more than I did Auden at the time. Stevie Smith I found in the Longman anthology edited by George MacBeth, and borrowed an LP of her reading from the library. I could probably still recall every word of that LP. She didn't help me much to write, though.

I've particularly admired Michael Longley, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. In translation Milosz, Cavafy, Lorca. I'm not sure how much I've been inspired by them in my writing, but I suppose they write poems that combine something solid and something transparent, and that's what I feel poems should have. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience have it. Marvell, too. Michael Longley taught the last Arvon course I went on, five years ago, and his pebble-in-the-pool minimalism so much caught my mood I seem to have turned towards photography instead, as a way of creating the wordless haiku.

The late Michael Donaghy's evening classes at City University were pretty formative - he was a good role model as a contemporary poet, though not easy to attain his combination of polish and depth. A workshop group formed from people who took his class (still going, in a way), and an early stage of "Shoreditch Orchid" got the treatment there.

I'm pretty much an urban person and I write about London because I live in it. Transport comes into my poems a lot, probably because I'm using it a lot. I noticed once that I'd written dozens of poems with buses and trains in, without meaning to at all.
 
7. Have you ever won a prize, been a writer in residence, taught poetry, collaborated with other writers?

I have won a few things - that last Arvon week was a prize in the Ledbury competition. I've had pamphlets from the Poetry Business.

I've done most things with poetry one way and another. I've organised poetry events, I was at Poetry London for a while, mostly as listings editor, and I've edited anthologies. A couple of times I stood in for others running poetry classes, including Michael's once when I was no longer a participant, but my spell of teaching creative writing officially, to a mixed group doing everything from detective novels to haiku, rather convinced me I'm not cut out to teach anything.