Here’s the poem. I’ve added notes. Hover over each underlined line to see how I arrived there. As a collage poem set as an exercise it ended up addressing – somewhat obliquely – the issues I was avoiding. The title didn’t come until later – and I arrived at it quite randomly – even if I did write ‘Note: you can’t create successful randomness’ in my lecture notes at Arvon. I think randomness occurs by accident, so the less you focus on the thing that’s blocking you the more likely you are to reach it.

The Weather in the Womb

Upstairs in a room facing north
a summer
       marries immediately.
Our job was to get her to drink.
It took a seismic shift to get changed
        after dinner.

Autumn is head down in the sink.
The trees taste iron and wren
       droppings.
Oh my rustic plectrum!
Your music is
       where the leaf falls.
             Where it
                      falls
the river hums like a PC.

       Take note
of the ice on the water trough in the yard
and the Eskimo oil from deep sea fish
       caught by a bear
whose coat is a lichen of silver tipped hair
fuzzy as alkanet.

There is a God
       and he dwells in the perfect
horse dung on the bridle path.

Evening is the hardest skin we carry.

Evening is the hardest skin we carry. I got this last line for The Weather in the Womb from an exercise that I adapted from the US National Poetry Month 30/30 challenge – writing 30 drafts in 30 days. I didn’t sign up, but I dabbled.

The original exercise replaces every noun from a pre-existing poem with the seventh noun that follows on in the dictionary. I didn’t have a dictionary, so decided to replace nouns consecutively from another poem. I think it’s a good way to generate a new line if you’re stuck, although of course, you benefit (or not, as the case may be) from the syntax of the original.

The original poem is Jane Hirshfield’s Hope and Love from Each Happiness Ringed by Lions . I don’t have permission so I include just an excerpt.

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
if the solitary habit
is their way…

…I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry…

The ‘replacement’ text was verse 4 of Wild Idyll, by Mexican poet Manuel Jose Othon (1858-1906) translated by Samuel Beckett.

The salt and infinitely bitter plain,
Like a dead ocean’s dessicated bed,
And in the grey distance, by way of haven,
The precipitous crags, forsaken and stark.

On my rigid face the evening spreads,
like unguent, horrible obscurity,
and on your skin, burnt by the sun, the copper
and sepia of the wilderness’s rocks.

And in the hollow where eternal shadow,
beneath the cragy peaks’ enormous frown,
provides a bower and cavern for our love,

the lianas of your body twine
about the virile subugating trunk
in a vast palpitation of our lives.

The translated poem was this:

All salt
the blue plain
slept among the ocean.
I do not know the custom of beds,
do not know
if the solitary distance
is their way
or if he listened for
some missing crags
not knowing even
that was what he did
in the blowing
face in the dark.
I know that
evening is the hardest

skin we carry.
He slept with his long sun
folded, like a rock
put away.

The original ‘hope is the hardest love we carry’, with its confident use of abstract nouns, delivers more, but I liked ‘evening’ here a lot, particularly with ‘skin’: it fit with the summer that marries and the autumn with its head in the sink. The evening as death, and all that we carry with that certainity.

I Heart Vie from Karen McCarthy on Vimeo.

This is a video diary from Arvon with the Complete Works crew that was led by Mimi Khalvati and Pascale Petit. There were many tasks set: one of which was to write a poem exploring animal myths. I was given a bear and had wanted a wolf. I struggled long and hard with the bear poem, then set it aside for a collage poem that had the added incentive of being a competition. Ten hot shots and one Amazon voucher in the offing.

I thought the non-narrative structure a collage poem naturally encourages might relax me, and also, distract me, as the bear poem was addressing two distinct but related subjects I’d been avoiding: my pregnancy and the imminent death of my mother-in-law from an aggressive brain tumour. Both felt too close to really get anywhere with at the time.

This is part of the way through the process. I’ll talk about some of the other decisions and sources for lines and phrases in a separate post. I’m working retrospectively here, as I thought it would be an interesting one to share as the process lends itself to Notebooks so readily. It’s one I prepared earlier as it were. I’m travelling backwards now, in the future I will be hurtling forwards.