This isn’t live as in live TV but it is live in that I’ve written and posted my drafts as I go — so the process is transparent.

One of the photos I used as a prompt to help generate the poem.

One of the things I do when I’m writing is read other poetry books. I write down quotes and snippets that stand out or relate to my train of thought..

When I set the Hawk Prompt I also picked out this quote by Carolyn Forche, but when I wrote my rough draft I didn't respond to this, although I find that sound is very closely connected to the emotional tenor of my work.

Now as work on this edit I’ve returned to my original notes/free write. I rarely write poem drafts in lineated form. The messier my first draft the more likely it is to produce something worth working on.

I realise also I'm back on a subject I've been avoiding: grief. I don't want to bang on about my angst - but this is where the emotional heart seems to lie. I also picked up Sharon Olds' One Secret Thing in the library. Sometimes I find her work claustrophobic (if brilliant) but reading the first poem in the book 'EVERYTHING' that opens 'Most of us are never conceived./Many of us are never born -/we live in a private ocean for hours,/weeks... really heartened me and gave me the permission I needed to keep writing about this personal subject.

Re-reading my early scrawl I can see that the opening I’d originally marked for deletion, may just be where the poem needs to move towards: ‘I am most interested in the feet and claws’. In the notes above, it’s my son’s feet that I move towards.

The next step is to think about whether this is one or two poems. Is it the hawk or the child? Or is it hawk and child? Now I’ve finished scanning pages I’m going to go back to my notebooks for a bit, see what I get next.

Showing this kind of rough edit is uncomfortable I have to say: this is definitely in my discard pile. It's also disconcerting, changing my mind in public like this, but that's the constant part of the editing process. Trying new things. But it's interesting as a process: to identify the true ambition of the poem - not in terms of its syntactical realisation - but in the 'what does it want be/do' kind of way.

Yes, I definitely think it’s two poems. This new verse arrangement seems to have honed it down a bit - it feels more right like this.

I realise that what I was chasing here is the idea of being able to see an animal very close up - a wild animal. I once saw this fox that had just been run over, and it was all still perfect. It was fascinating. That moment when something's not long dead and still has the life in it. That's different to this, but this idea of proximity - as in Wing - is still there.

This is an excerpt from my poem, Wing

We find you, dear Wing,
in the half-dark
on the way back from the piglets…

I played around a lot with the PIGLETS … taking this line in and out of the poem. But I realised that it was integral to the whole energy and emotion of the piece. It was the SOUND of the piglets snufflilng and snorting, and this sense of life and innocence they evoked I was chasing in the poem. I realised their inclusion was essential, without them I couldn’t HEAR that noise –  and it was this Click through to see the video. Including this hyperlink and writing the poem up here helped create the draft. I wanted to create a poem with links, and in so doing I realised that that was an important step in creating the atmosphere of the piece.

a grey goose flaps overhead…

you are solid but unseen, mysterious
as a somersault inside the womb;

here, folded to a cup of hands,
plump as a wood pigeon
in the long, flat January grass
you are singular and intense
like a girl breathing quietly by a window,
her just-cut hair pressed against the glass.

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.

Here is the beautiful letter poem Miriam wrote to me. I don’t like to use adjectives like ‘beautiful’ much as they become meaningless in their ubiquity, but it really is exquisite.

Notice how the paper is yellowed. Miriam hand-coloured it.

Writing letters does feel decadent somehow. Not the act of writing itself, the scratch of pen on paper, which feels more like an act of devotion, but the luxury of time and quiet. I know e-readers will allow us to travel light, but every tweet takes me further away from birds, feathers, wings, breeze, currents and pockets of air. Things webby do facilitate photos, spontaneity, sharing and blogging but i-phones, crackberries et al are also talismans of fear. Twitching, or compulsive clicking, needs firm management. I’ll be fine once I get some time in the library (no wi-fi, bliss!).

And here is a picture that precedes my next letter to Miriam..

"I will push my nail/into her neck and make/a lovely necklace out of her green bones" from Alice Oswald's poem Daisy.

Today I received my first letter from Karen. Since our meeting on Monday I’ve had a strange expecting-post feeling - an excitement. The feeling comes in the morning, but of course the post doesn’t. But when I got home at 11pm, there it was. Karen sent her letter in a beautiful card with a picture of a bird - a symbol for our new correspondance. Here’s a half-light photo:

Inside was a pressed flower: white, with yellow stamens poking out, surrounded by grass-like shoots - like the veins of a leaf without the structure.  I’ll have to ask Karen what kind it is. Opening the envelope was pure delight. A letter holds so many possibilities, so simply.

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about letters this year. I sent and received hundreds of letters as a teenager, partly because I moved from the Scottish Highlands to Devon, leaving my best friends behind. In April this year, as part of the Slow Down London festival, I ran my first Creative Letter Writing Workshop at Foyles bookshop. The idea was to ask ‘What do letters mean now that they’re no longer an essential means of communication?’. For me, the answer to this is exciting, because I don’t know - they can become whatever we want - fragile documents found only in archives and museums, or a living form of writing that opens doors to the unexpected…

This Autumn I ran a series of ‘Snail Mail’ workshops, and received an amazing and certainly unexpected response. All sorts of people have shared stories - memories of opening letters, letter-inheritances from loved ones, the need to receive something physical in times of grief. One participant wrote a letter to her pair of walking boots, another to the science cabinet at his primary school, another to ‘flirtatiousness’. Some of these letters can be seen on my website.

As well as the workshops, I’m keen to explore letters and letter writing in my poetry. So I couldn’t have been happier when Karen invited me to start a creative correspondance. We haven’t imposed any criteria on ourselves - it will be organic and neither of us knows what will happen. I already feel inspired - receiving a carefully pressed flower, smelling faintly of the book it once lived in, has to be the start of something beautiful…

This is where I stop typing, and pick up my pen…