March

Hedges gleam yellow with forsythia; honey-scented daffodils decorate the windowsill. The light returns; a different energy pervades.  I stumble into spring.  My overwintered bones soak up the pale sunlight and I begin to create anew. So much of my winter seems to have been marking time and I’ve suffered the inhibition of not just a writer’s block but a writer’s freeze. The room I write in is rather cold and dark and I’ve spent the past three months huddled in sweaters, under electric light. Trying to type with cold fingers. Often with a hot water bottle on my lap.

When I tell people I’m a poet, people often ask me how I get my inspiration. It’s a hard question to answer honestly. Ideas come from everywhere but they arrive as a kind of gift; and to try to analyse why this happens seems reductive at the very least. A certain combination of words, either written somewhere, or spoken by someone, often in a completely different context, can spark a line of thought: it is like picking up the end of a dangling piece of thread and then following it to see where it will take me. Sometimes the thread appears, tantalisingly near, when I am half-asleep. I keep a notebook and pencil next to my bed and will try to scribble down what comes to me straight away. Similarly, this can happen when I am out walking; I have to stop and jab at my phone to record the idea that has been gifted to me. If I don’t, it will evaporate like sun-warmed frost on grass. And will be impossible to reclaim.

Anything can make a poem, for poetry is life itself, written out concisely and obliquely with its own weight and musicality. Like music, it begins and ends in silence but the silence of a poem is the white space on the page. And the words often seem to be already there, in some odd way. The magic is in calling them. Michelangelo said the same of his sculpture: ‘The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there. I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.’  In poetry, the chiselling away is often a painful process. One gets very attached to phrases and descriptions and it hurts to delete these. But nothing is ever wasted. As in life, where most experiences, good and bad, teach us something which can be useful later, so can the discarded scraps of a poem be stored and re-used, in a different context. I keep all the trimmings: sometimes they can re-emerge in a better form.

The larger idea of re-using and repurposing is thankfully gaining traction again in our wasteful society now: it’s called upcycling, or creative reuse. And I discovered a fascinating  word to describe the ‘left-overs’: those scraps of food, of paper and art materials, or fabric, thread and trimmings. They are ‘ORTS’. Dressmakers and embroiderers will have their jars of ‘orts’. I have mine, too. My file of snipped off remnants, waiting to be upcycled. For poetry is indeed life and nothing of either should ever be wasted.