How does a poem begin?
Often with something the world throws at me, colliding with something I didn’t know was already germinating inside. I have a particularly strong urge to look very closely at detail, and I believe it’s a powerful thing to be able do that. For me there’s synaesthesia at play too – the small details of the natural world in particular are like sirens, I am physically unable to ignore a broken shell hit by the light in a certain way. And often it feels like there’s a reason for the ‘need to notice’ that very thing at that very moment – it’s subconsciously connected to a concept or experience my brain’s been gnawing away at. There’s this wonderful ‘click’ when the two converge, very-conscious and very-not, the ‘Oh!’ moment, and if I can catch the feeling of that I think the reader feels it, too, therapeutic and satisfying. More literally, moving begins the poem – running or swimming puts me into a state where phrases coalesce and arrange themselves as if by magic in my head. As someone with ADHD, my brain a lot of the time is a skittery, leaping, crowded thing, but both being drawn in deep to detail and moving have the same effect – everything goes held-breath, slows down, grows quiet and floaty-clear. In those states, poems are born. They layer and sort and make sense of all the vast noise of our navigating in a way I can’t ever explain, except by writing them, and hoping other people feel it inside the lines.
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