day twenty-one

Five days since my last post! I hadn’t quite realised it had been so long. It’s partly because due to work last week my schedule was a bit jumbled, which meant the writing in the morning/posting at lunchtime routine didn’t work. The weekend had its own rhythms, and I avoid using screens on Sundays; and yesterday I was ill in bed with a rotten cold. But I have been writing: every day, apart from yesterday (and I really missed it). The other reason for not posting quite so much is that, for the same reasons (work busyness and illness) I’ve not really done much in terms of the scrapbooking element of this blog. Nothing apart from watching films and, er, drinking wine. Both lovely, but not much to write home about.

Writing wise, things are still moving on at quite a lick: I’ve already forgotten exactly what I did on which day, but I’ve been tinkering with the Pembrokeshire poem, drafted a new one (megafauna!), and today wrote a whole new piece, just like that, from an idea that’s been floating around since September. Ta-da! I have no idea if it’s any good or not, but I enjoyed writing it. I think maybe I just needed to get it out of my system.

So, another new benefit from the write-daily regime: not only is it getting easier and more fun each day, I’m actually beginning to feel a bit… addicted, perhaps? It’s rare that I’ve felt like this about writing poetry. Prose, yes; poetry, no. Each day I’m chomping at the bit, and it’s pretty exhilarating.

day sixteen

Another early start (it’ll be the same again tomorrow) meant another missed writing appointment this morning: yes, I should be getting up earlier, but no, I’m not. Unlike yesterday, though, I didn’t write on the train, and for a while it looked like I might miss a day (horror!) – I got home exhausted, with writing the last thing on my mind. But then something kicked in – cussedness, perhaps – and I decided to just write for as long as my dinner took to cook, which was twenty-five minutes (actually longer than I have been writing for most mornings), and was twenty-five minutes well spent on chipping away at the Pembrokeshire coast path poem. Of all the days I’ve written, today I felt the proudest. If I’m actually sitting down to write on the days I least want to, I think I’m getting somewhere – in terms of habit-creation, I mean.

Apologies, invisible audience, for the introspective and self-absorbed nature of these posts. I suppose I see it as documenting the month’s experiment, and I don’t seem to have been doing enough stuff this week to balance out the boring detail of day to day writing.

day fourteen and an evening birdsong walk

I am so tired that I can barely keep my eyes open (I know, and it’s only 10.30), so I will keep this as brief as I can while simultaneously reporting on all the things that are on my sleepy mind…

First, the writing got done. It was my dedicated writing day today (swapped with the usual Thursday for work-related reasons), so again, of course it did, there can be no possible excuses. But it needs to be reported!

And what a great day it was… I turned yesterday’s notes, which I wasn’t sure about, into a whole, new, finished, poem. And yes, I think it works. Of course, it may not be the best thing I’ve ever written, but as a poem it does what I wanted it to, if you see what I mean (I’m thinking about Sylvia Plath’s observation that a poem can be a table or a chair or a pull-along duck… as long as it works, it’s fine). So that’s three brand-new poems in two weeks… I’m ashamed (but also thrilled) to say that’s more than I wrote (poetry-wise) in the whole of 2012. This writing daily lark needs to continue.

I also shoved at the Pembrokeshire coast path draft a bit more, and got a bit closer, I think. It’s hard work, partly because it’s long, and partly because I think it runs the risk of being description/feeling. I’m not entirely sure I know what it’s doing yet, but for now I’m just trusting that if I keep at it, it too will turn into something useful, whether that’s a table or a pull-along duck.

So one of the satellite effects of this writing daily thing is that, as momentum increases, so does my desire to get things out there. I’ve always found submitting poetry to competitions and journals about as painful as writing them in the first place – in part just because of the sheer boring-ness of it, and in part because, yes, I’m lazy and disorganised. But today I submitted four pieces to Magma magazine, and I’m working on my submission to the Faber new poets scheme – ambitious, yes, but why the hell not? It doesn’t cost anything to enter, like most competitions do. I’m also thinking about a submission to a new online journal, and two other upcoming competitions run by Mslexia. The likelihood is that none of these will actually come to anything… but just having a go feels empowering. And grouping all my poems together, in some sort of coherent order, has helped me identify which ones still have slight disfigurements that need fixing, as well as rediscovering some that I’d forgotten about/mislaid after The Great Laptop Theft of 2012.

I’ve been meaning to mention last Thursday’s walk for the last few days but just not had the time to fit it in… I’m tempted to put it off again today but know that if I don’t write about it soon all the freshness and zest will be lost. I’ll keep it brief: I live pretty close to the unbelievably gorgeous Sydenham Hill Wood, the largest remaining tract of the old Great North Wood, which used to stretch from Deptford to Selhurst. It’s now managed as a nature reserve, and it’s a really special place: it’s hard to believe you’re so close to central London when you’re there. Quite by chance I stumbled across an online mention of last Thursday’s evening birdsong walk, and as I’ve been getting into birds a bit recently (in the most casual way possible – mainly just keeping an eye out for them, and enjoying watching them in the trees around my flat) and generally just loving woodland, I went along. Although the wind meant that we didn’t hear a huge amount of birdsong, it was still brilliant. Learning to listen out for and identify a few birds just from their calls was pretty thrilling, and learning about the wood and its history from conservation officer Daniel Greenwood was fascinating. Plus being in woodland at dusk is pretty special by itself. There’s another guided tree identification walk this Thursday, and if I can manage the timings work-wise, I’ll be there. Highly recommended if you just happen to be in South East London.

Swifts weren’t on the menu, but here’s a piece I wrote about listening to them a few years ago, on London Grip.

days ten and eleven

Because I didn’t post yesterday, and Thursday’s post was written early-afternoon, I want to report here that I did finish ‘the horse poem’ – well, a workable draft, anyway: nothing’s really finished (ever?) until it’s been workshopped by poetry friends, and already I’m unsure about a couple of elements. And the title definitely isn’t right; currently it’s labouring under ‘The words I’d yet to write’ (the Ray Bradbury title just didn’t work, in the end). Still, I got it as far as I think I can for the moment, and I feel hugely pleased. That was the first poem I’ve finished since February, and one that had been on my radar to write since last summer, and writing something new after a long pause always feels very good. But then I actually finished the other poem, too! I’ve called it ‘The Cherry Tree’ and yes, it’s definitely in memoriam Dallas Willard, bless his dear heart. Again, it needs workshopping, and in fact I’ve done some tinkering on it today; but getting to two good workable drafts in one day felt a huge achievement. The effects of writing everyday are definitely cumulative: it’s always hard work, of course, but the whole thing seems to be flowing much more easily. Long may it continue.

Since then, I’ve had two slightly out of kilter days in a row: both yesterday and today I’ve done my twenty minutes’ poetry writing (tinkering with ‘The Cherry Tree’ and working on a new/old draft about walking the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path), but not after my morning trigger. Yesterday I made the mistake of opening up my browser – this is a new temptation, only possible if I’m working on a draft on my laptop rather than longhand notes – and that was that, pretty much: twenty minutes of reading twitter instead of writing. Oh well. So I started my lunchbreak with twenty minutes of writing instead (which is why I then didn’t post here). Then this morning I had a lie-in – it is the weekend, after all – and made the decision that I’d do the same again today: I was keen to get out of the house to get on with what I’d planned. Obviously writing later in the day is much better than not writing at all, but I need to be careful not to let this happen too much: part of the strength of a habit is its being anchored in something else that happens every day, no matter what, and I’m still building up my daily poetry-writing muscles. And that morning window is such delicious writing time…

I was going to write about a brilliant (guided) evening walk in Sydenham Hill Wood that I went on on Thursday night, but dinner’s calling me. More on Monday (Sunday is officially no-screen day).

day seven, and Robin Robertson

Well, dear reader, I missed two days – in a row. And so early in the challenge! My excuse: it was a bank holiday weekend, and I had house guests, and there was unplanned partying… and I’m not going to worry about it too much. I just need to get back on with it, remembering that any habit I create needs to be robust enough to stand a few swerves.

But it was great to get back into it this morning. One thing I am finding is that I’m trying to carve out time at other points in the day to do more – so I’m looking forward to this week’s writing day. I’m hoping I’ll have the two poems I’m working on finished soon, and I’m already looking forward to grappling with the other drafts I’ve got lined up.

At lunchtime today I finished Robin Robertson‘s Hill of Doors; highly recommended. I didn’t fall in love with it quite so much as his previous collection, The Wrecking Light, but it’s still wonderful, especially if you like your poetry darkly beautiful, with a  good dose of myth and mystery. (I do.) Here’s a link to a rather lovely one: ‘A Childhood’.

Woo Hoo: day four

As I was sitting down to write today’s post, this fantastic song came on the radio:

and it felt very appropriate, because I must confess I feel pretty jubilant today. As I was coming back from my run this morning a line for a poem just emerged in my head, which doesn’t often happen to me – it tends to be an image or cluster of images that suddenly suggests itself as the germ of something new. I wonder if it happened because I’m creating this new habit of writing (poetry) every day, so my unconscious is getting used to revving itself up first thing in the morning? Maybe. I’ll happily take it as an added benefit if so.

Even better, the knock-on effect was that as I was eating my breakfast and reading Robin Robertson‘s quietly magnificent Hill of Doors, I suddenly felt the urge to write some notes for this new poem. I didn’t want to wait, and I already knew that I wanted to spend my twenty minutes today working on the horse thing, so I just put everything aside (book, halfway through a line – sorry, Robin; breakfast) and scribbled down some notes. I guess in the normal run of things this only happens once a month or so, every couple of weeks at most – suddenly being gripped by an idea and writing down a quick first sketch of it, I mean. So that felt great: just to have it there, written down, for me to return to and start working on once the horse poem (or whatever else in my list of drafts is next) is finished.

But the knock-on effect of that was that I felt really impatient to finish what I’m working on right now, and when I got to my twenty minutes’ writing time things very quickly seemed to come into focus. As well as not being distracted, or taking time to warm up, I had that delicious sense (which is the part of writing poetry that I really enjoy) that what I was working on might be beginning to resemble a poem, working parts and all. It’s a strange moment. I kept finding myself acting as if I were with a shy animal (appropriate given the subject matter), physically turning my face away from the page so as not to spook it while I gathered my thoughts, then coming back and very quickly changing things, slotting things into place. It felt pretty exhilarating, and I’m almost, almost there.

I left it for the last five minutes and went straight back to the notes I’d made during breakfast, typing them up quickly into a first draft. And the delicious thing about that was that I didn’t have the feeling that I was writing down some horribly lumpy ungainly prose; it felt as though just this first draft was much more of a poem, already, than most of my first drafts. It had a confidence about its shape and a simplicity that felt very authentic and very immediate. Who knows what I’ll think of it when I next look at it (it doesn’t matter much), but for now all I can say is that if today’s quiet moments of triumph are the result of only four days in a row of writing, then sign me up for writing daily for ever.

Woo hoo!

day three

Not much to report today. I did it; I was quite distracted, but I did it. Third day in a row. It seems insignificant for someone who’s been writing (or trying to) for so long, and who actually has a whole designated writing day a week… but there we go. I need to create a daily poetry writing habit, and these are my first steps.

I experimented by taking out all of the prepositions to see if that helped move the draft along a bit. It might have done. I’m still trying to work out what shape this poem really wants to be, I think. Some sort of exploded sonnet, perhaps? But with the elegance of the touchstone poem that I’ve got in my mind, Machado‘s ‘Last Night as I was Sleeping’:

Last night I dreamed
– blessed illusion –
that I had a beehive here
in my heart
and that
the golden bees were making
white combs and sweet honey
from my old failures.

(That’s just the second stanza.)

Still humming from yesterday’s Light Show. If you’re in London and can make it to the Hayward early doors over the long weekend to pick up day tickets, I highly recommend it.

 

Begin again, begin again

I’ve thought about restarting this blog many times, but tonight’s gig finally convinced me to get on and do it. Two words: Kate Tempest.

I first saw her perform an ambitious live show, with a band, a couple of months ago; it was stunning, but tonight was just spoken word, and it was much more raw, and incredibly personal. It felt a bit like being slapped in the face, but in a good way. Basic take home message: get on with it, girl.

Message received, loud and clear.

the aim of waking is to dream

In celebration of national poetry day, and in the hope that I may yet resurrect this blog (which I’ve been wanting to do for months), here’s a favourite poem. I copied it out into the front of my (engagements) diary at the beginning of the year, and have returned to it weekly, to remind myself of the power of words and the beauty of ’all sweet things’. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

in time of

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me

– e.e. cummings

The Hunt in the Forest

I love John Burnside’s poetry. I’ve actually only read one of his collections, Gift Songs, which I read and posted about last year on my 52 Poets blog here. But this poem, ‘The Hunt in the Forest’, just popped up on my RSS feed from the Guardian poetry page, and I think it’s so wonderful I want to post it here.

How children think of death is how the shadows
gather between the trees: a hiding place
for everything the grown-ups cannot name.
Nevertheless, they hurry to keep their appointment
far in the woods, at the meeting of parallel lines,
where everything is altered by its own
momentum – altered, though we say transformed -
greyhound to roebuck, laughter to skin and bone;

and no one survives the hunt: though the men return
in threes and fours, their faces blank with cold,
they never quite arrive at what they seem,
leaving a turn of phrase or a song from childhood
deep in the forest, bent to the juddering kill
and waiting, while their knives slip through the blood
like butter, or silk, until the heart is still.