Amy Louise Wyatt

Bangor’s Amy Louise Wyatt is a Northern Irish poet and artist whose poetry informs her art, and vice versa. And though she’s not consistently written it, she says that throughout her life ‘poetry has come looking for me when it needs me, and when I need it’. Holder of an MA in Creative Writing from the Open University, she is most proud of continuing with her poetry, despite the challenges. 

Wyatt was inspired to write by her GCSE English teacher, Mrs Neville who ‘had a passion for poetry; the rhythm, the voices, the shapes, the tones, its imperative nature’, which she also felt in the same way, even if she ‘couldn’t translate that gut-punch into an A grade essay’. Since being diagnosed with ADHD in later life, Wyatt has found poetry offers her the ‘opportunities to just be [her]self, to defy conventions, and make sense of [her] own emotions and thoughts through the rigorous editing process; chipping away until only the necessary bits are left’.

‘When I can’t express to others how I feel through everyday words, poetry allows me to do so without judgement… when I can’t control other parts of my life, I can control my letters, words, my pauses, stanzas; mould the shape of my feelings into something ready to give’

As a poet and artist Wyatt takes inspiration ‘from wide and far’, but considers her biggest influence to be her mother, the painter and printmaker Alice Wyatt. She finds the writing process to be ‘cathartic’ as ‘it pushes you to read your poem from another perspective’, and performing poetry to be ‘daunting, but emotionally valuable’. She says of performing, ‘I love never knowing if anyone is really listening. But they only need to catch one phrase, one line, one message, and if it has an impact, then nothing beats that feeling’.