The TS Eliot prize winner on distractions, idleness and the art of forgetting
- Read Every Creeping Thing by Jacob Polley
When my days were all nearly all my own, I used to keep to a routine. Turn up at the page. Achieve something, a little something, before the afternoon crept in with interesting stuff on the radio, a walk in the air, that first glass of wine … I’ve written prose and poetry, and I found that a routine was essential for the prose writing. Then the writing day was, in the early stages of a novel and for a long time after the early stages, about amassing the words. The words had to be there, or there wouldn’t be anything there. That sounds like an odd thing to say now I’ve said it, but I suspect that writing a poem can be as much about the storing up of the energy before the poem’s written down as about the casting of it on to paper. One can have a strong sense of a poem being there, even when there isn’t anything there. Spooky. But this difference between prose and poetry might only be a difference in my own faiths in the two ways in which I can reliably both waste and escape time.
If I’m writing a poem, ideally I should probably be kept busy for most of the day doing anything other than writing. This helps me to forget that I’ve ever written anything, which is a necessary if bewildering condition that, for me, means I can set out across the page, as if across that fabulous snowfield of childhood. Wow! Snow! And look what it’s done to the world. I need that snow-wow. I might get lost. Too soon it might all go to dirty slush. But I could be out in the cold for ages. I could meet something totally unexpected, looming from the whiteness.
I need to set out across the page as if crossing that fabulous snowfield of childhood – I need that snow-wow
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