Writing
has been an essential part of my identity for over 30 years (I started very
young). At the same time, writing has never really been my career, or my life’s
focus. Writing happens sometimes, often, frequently, occasionally, most days,
not for ages. This means that I have had countless writing moments in my life,
but few “writing days”, and certainly not anything I could describe as a
“writing schedule”. (This is also one of the reasons why, around 20 years ago,
I found myself turning away from the idea I’d long held of being a novelist,
and focusing increasingly on poetry.)
As
I’ve worn many different writer-hats in my life, I’ve found that all of them
have involved a different approach. Deadlines are probably good for me, but I
wouldn’t want them for everything. I have definitely had “writing days” when
doing freelance work: these might look like an afternoon researching and
writing at the British Library, or at the Refugee Documentation Centre library
in Dublin. But in recent years, what I mainly write is poetry, and a blog about
poetry. And for me, both of those only come from moments, which stretch into
thoughts, which stretch into persistent thoughts, until pressure builds up and
writing happens.
I
often write when I travel, or after a trip. Travelling brings me into freedom
and attentiveness, and the ideas, the hooks, the nudges which lead to poems
often start pretty quickly on a trip. I have joked that taking a trip is an
expensive way to get a poem or two. But it usually works. The last time I
started writing a poem (as yet unfinished), I was walking on an immense beach
on Amrum, in the North Frisian Islands of Germany, with the wind hissing sand
over my feet. I started making notes on my phone as I didn’t have a notebook.
That was the moment. I had a similar moment on Parliament Hill in the summer,
but I’m not sure yet what’s going to happen with that nascent poem. After this
happens I think about those poems every day. They never really leave me, and
that’s one way I know that I should (sooner or later) write them. Equally, I
sometimes engage in a kind of brinkmanship where the genesis comes, and perhaps
a few lines come, but I don’t write them down. I just keep thinking about them.
It’s quite possible that this is stupidity, laziness, fear of commitment or
something else equally delightful, but I also wonder if the pressure can be
valuable: by “pressure”, I mean something like how the pearl forms in the oyster.
And I have realised that a lot of my writing work comes from my mind chewing
over things in the background, sometimes consciously, but often very much out
of sight until something surfaces.
The
upshot is that I’ve written on the couches at London’s Southbank Centre,
surrounded by a nest of bags, books and mobile devices; in a Luxembourg hotel
room; in a café in Geneva, drinking an expensive coffee during a snowstorm; by
a pool in Cairo in 40 degree heat; on a stone bench by the river in Battersea
Park; and sprawled awkwardly on my bed (I do not have a writing desk). Moments
such as these make up my writing days, hours, minutes and seconds.
I
recently came across the following in an interview with the late Lucie
Brock-Broido: “The Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert, says there are
two kinds of writers: cats and oxen. The ox is plodding and deliberate, and
goes back and forth and back and forth and line-by-line, and dutifully plows
his acre by the light of day. And then there’s the cat—who’s sleek and nocturnal
and furtive and has sporadic leaps at writing. I am one of those.” I too am the
cat in this scenario, and Brock-Broido (and Herbert) said it better than I ever
could.
Clarissa Aykroyd grew up in Victoria,
Canada and now lives in London, England. Her work has appeared in publications
including The Interpreter’s House, The Island Review, Lighthouse, The Missing
Slate and Strange Horizons,
among others. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the
author of a blog about poetry and poets, thestoneandthestar.blogspot.co.uk
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