I found this grey wing in the twilight last week and I’ve been drafting and redrafting around it ever since. I’ve been struggling to capture the essence of it which was like the sound of someone breathing quietly in a room overlooking an orchard. Not someone sleeping, someone standing at a window.

It makes me feel exposed, sharing a page like this – the stuff I write when I can’t get where I want to go. But that’s often where the heart of the poem lies I find. In the scribble where I wrestle with what I’m really trying to say.

It also demonstrates the structure of how I work. When I’m writing I often stack up books I want to read in the library: the choices can be quite random as well as more focused. Then I dip into them when I get stuck on a draft. The Seamus Heaney quote from a poem in The Fragment was heartening as I struggled with a beginning, never mind the end.

I also found this quote from Socrates who says the poet is ‘light, winged and holy’ and wrote it out in my book.

I find copying out quotes and other peoples' poems helps me relax when I'm stuck on a draft.

Writing words that aren’t you’re own takes away the pressure ‘to be inspired’ and frees you up. You’re writing without thinking, then your own words can start to break through. I’m not sure it’s always the rather lofty sounding inspiration Socrates talks about, but it’s a drop of sweat in the ocean. I like how the word ‘winged’ flew in. I did want more of a sense of lightness – and flight, but it wasn’t until a later draft – after re-reading one of my letters from Miriam – that I realised I had to get off the ground somehow. I am now working on it as a letter form poem.

Meanwhile, I found some yellow things.

Two girls from Camberwell Art School set up a pop up gallery in Brixton and made plaster casts of bananas from the market. The skins are real but when you drop one on the floor it clunks in a very unbananalike manner.

Tags: bird, death, Karen McCarthy Woolf, letter writing, Miriam Nash, notebooks, rough draft, Seamus Heaney, Socrates, the dark, wing

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Karen McCarthy Woolf, Miriam Nash, Tapping the Trend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.