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.

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.

My last entry on Open Notebooks was on 30 July when I was waiting to give birth. In between then and now the worst thing that has ever happened to me happened: after a healthy pregnancy of 41 weeks I went in to a long labour that lasted for nearly five days all in all. It wasn’t until the morning of 7 August that the midwives picked up an irregularity in the baby’s heartbeat and I was rushed in to theatre for an emergency Caesarian. Unfortunately, the surgery was unsuccessful and after a long fight for life, our son Otto’s heart and lungs gave out. He was a first and a much longed-for child.

The rest of August is a blur of shock and grief. I think the body literally puts you into physical shock so you can cope with the spiritual and emotional turmoil. I didn’t know whether I would write or not, but as it turned out, it felt quite natural to open my notebook, start a journal and write poems about the experience.

A Parcel from Helen

The next question was whether I would share that process here. In many ways it was something I wanted to do: surely this was the point of Open Notebooks? The death itself had been necessarily public: pregnancy is a time of expectation and many of the physical changes in the body are obvious. Friends, family and colleagues await news. Yet the intensity and depth of grief felt inherently private. My Twitter, Facebook, online blogging and browsing were all abruptly halted. Even connecting to the internet to check email was something I was slow to do. I needed the quiet of trees and birds, to look at the sea not the screen.

The Beach at Cassis

A huge wave of support washed in from everyone we knew. The buzzer would sound and packages arrived. The parcels, notes of condolence, cards and flowers were a comfort, and something I came to enjoy, despite their provenance.

Abiye Sends Me 'The Poet Reclining' and Some Shades. There's a beautiful synchronicity to this package's arrival. All week I'd been working on a poem - in my mind was a long walk in the Luberon earlier in the summer I wanted to compare to a painting by Chagall, with a horse, green fields and a bruised-looking sky. There was something very particular about the colours and the atmosphere I wanted to catch but I couldn't quite conjure up the image. Abiye's gift came with a postcard of Chagall's The Poet Reclining - the very same image.

The Shades Were Hot Too

I began also to venture back online.  One day I clicked through to fellow poet Miriam Nash’s blog post about her creative letter writing workshops which explore the letter as a form. I loved this idea. I left a comment and also started to think about how I’d enjoyed the snail mail letters I’d received and how this experience related to the idea behind Open Notebooks.

With this in mind, Miriam and I met earlier this week and she’s going to be guest blogging on the site with me over the next few weeks.

Notebooks at the Ready

We’ll be sending each other snail mail letters, responding to the contents and using the correspondence to generate poems.

The Book of Stamps

I gave Miriam a book of stamps. She seemed very pleased with them. Now I need to write my first letter…