August

I begin in pencil. Always an HB Staedtler; striped like a wasp and with a sharp sting at the business end. Something with which I can make a first stab.

There is something very tactile about the body of a pencil. Something light and balanced, which perfectly suits a first draft. A pencil is neither warm nor cool; neither thick nor thin. It’s a compromise, a beginning; is somewhat tentative. It’s portable and seems at home anywhere. Demands little investment. And it holds no real commitment.

A pencil can be chewed when inspiration is failing, twirled like a miniature baton in order to waste time and drummed furiously to waste time in a more rhythmical manner. It can be tapped impatiently on the desk in cases of writer’s block or stuck behind an ear in order to go and answer the doorbell. It can also, very satisfyingly, be used to draw pointy beards, warts and satanic horns on the newspaper photos of politicians.

Something for which a pencil is very handy is the dense filling in of all the ‘o’s in a piece of writing or even on the pages of a particularly tedious book. A heresy for which I was often castigated at my primary school. But ha! Now I am doing an impersonation of a grown-up I can do exactly what I want with my ‘o’s. And I will.

A pencil can be carried in the elastic loop of my notebook (just look at all those ‘o’s there, crying out to be shaded in!). It can be arranged artfully in a pencil holder on a desk, maybe together with an accompanying small, sweet flower (I’m thinking tallish daisy? Fragrant spike of lavender?).  Or it can be fitted into a drawer or zipped into a pencil case. Pencil case, nota bene, not pen case.  Pens have their own endearing character and I have a perfectly charming shiny-green Kaweco Sport cartridge pen of which I am fond.  But pens are not the subject of my blog this month.

Pencils can always be sharpened when their keen edges blunt to mediocrity. And, most usefully of all, of course, their marks can be almost wholly erased. This quality of semi-permanence is a most fascinating one. And it is something which lends itself to poetry perfectly. Poetry captures something of the fragility of everyday reflections and emotions; something of that ephemeral attraction.

The best poems reveal themselves to our creative imagination like butterflies. We watch them open their painted wings for a fraction of a heartbeat on a warm brick wall or a sunny windowsill. They do not settle in one spot for long but their different colours and forms inspire us and we must respond. Like music, they can bring us that meditative quality of intense attention at the same time as the blissful letting go of that same focus. And it’s possible they may have something quite startling to say, so follow and see where they go. Do not pin them down but write them lightly. Then let them fly across the untouched white space of the page.

My next pamphlet collection, Written down in pencil, looks at some moments of transience and will be published by Hedgehog Press in 2024.