The ideas are coming together.  I took Karen’s hawk photos as a starting point - I really want to work in the yellow of the hawk’s talons as a counterpoint to the calmer colours - and I found a feather at my allotment, and some more in a box when I was sourcing objects for another project. Scanned and solarised, they become something alien and unworldly.

I often work from photographs, so I took my camera to the Poetry Gazebo festival in Culpeper Community Gardens. I like the ‘hidden’ connections that are gathering in the print, with colours drawn from an event organised by Naomi Woddis, another Open Notebooks guest booker, and Karen reading her Wing poem as I took pictures of the greenness all around.  Next I searched my photo archives for images of leaves, water and wings. All these images are spread around me as I work on the colour sketches.

I was fascinated by the shape of Karen’s drafts for her own hawk poem; I hope to incorporate the form of her handwritten notes into the final print.

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.

Some sheep and ponies
in the fields that flicker past,
windscreen wipers on.

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…

…I’m waiting for two things: one for the baby to arrive - today is my due date, and two, to work out how to upload my feet at dawn video entry that contains lots of stop frame feet images shot at dawn.

In the meantime I’m sorting through old notebooks and trying to find a stashed away but accessible place for them…I found this rough note along the way that I thought I might work more on.

The dark was so dark it had hands that pinned me to the flattened mattress and stuck a knee in my solar plexus. Outside starlight stiffened me like a starfish chucked in a bucket on a tumbledown pier. I did not struggle. A whole night where I tried not to tug at the edge of the madness. The Irish guy who had stayed an extra five days and still could not sleep at night. Days haunted by a purple cartoon of a motorbike accident, pages whipping open on it in the wind as sand blew round our ears and overtly muscular cats clawed at fish bones at our feet and spat hunger at each other.

Then this note from Anne Sexton:

‘Sometimes my doctors tell me I understand something in a poem that I haven’t integrated into my life . In fact I may be concealing it from myself, while revealing it to the readers.’