What I learned today….
That sometimes you can spend hours and hours fiddling around with a poem, trying to get it right, moving words around, from line to line, trying to find the right form for the feeling you are trying to express – and sometimes the poem just slips out, fully formed, onto the page: the images you are plucking out all seem to be in the form of stanzas – they are all, miraculously, the same size, and have the same metre, there is no question, as you move from one line to another where the line-breaks should lie. And when you write something like this you are almost breathless, trying to keep up with the flow, as though the voice that is dictating the poem to you in your head might just go too fast, that you might not be able to keep up and if you lose pace you might lose the whole poem and never find it again. It feels like opening a stable door and leaping on the mad horse as it runs out – then trying to stay on.
Sometimes poems like these, that seem pre written, come more slowly. These ones are more like songs: they sing themselves to you in your head, and then you know where they are going because the rules of ancient melody are there already and you feel as though you are using all your wits to stay with the song, slowly feeling your way so that you don’t lose it in the cacophony of the everyday.
