difficulty
The sun is most beautiful just before it rises, like the unspoken before it reaches the world—
I read Fourth Person Singular by Nuar Alsadir in three spaces across different days: at the desk in my bedroom; sprawled on a blanket outside and overlooking the infinitely textured highland hills; in the common room next to the fire.
It’s a slim volume, something I expected to finish in a single sitting, in a single room. But the pages contain poetry interspersed with lyric essay and other prose-like sections that resist categorisation. It is a smart and difficult book. I think I will need to reread it and read around it, submersing myself in its theoretical concepts. I’m already attached to it—the book is like a forest where you encounter several paths, choosing one, for now, with the intention of returning to take the others.
loch
I write a lot about water in a way that leans into metaphoricity: water’s clarity and buoyancy, its reflective surface, its ubiquity—the great sea of separation, the great sea of connection. Lately, I have been trying to chronicle my experience with the sea, with being physically submerged in water. I find this unexpectedly challenging. Last month, I wanted to write about swimming in Orkney and found myself increasingly blocked.
The cold water dislodges something in me, but articulation continues its withholding.
Is it because everything about the healing and ecstatic properties of water has already been written, and better than I could ever do? Maybe it’s just because I work better in metaphor, in abstractions, in hazy brushstrokes that are easy to hide in.
Heather, Amanda, Tolu, and I walk to Loch Laide and three of us swim in its shallow, brisk waters. I like being here with the others, shouting deliriously at each other in intervals
—it’s so cold
—here’s a warm patch
—it’s very shallow
—I’m so buoyant
—it’s beautiful
—this is the worst part
—this is the best part
—are there reeds over there?
—will it ever get deeper?
—are you coming in?
Afterward, I learn about this loch’s particular siltiness and reimagine my toes sinking deep into sediment. My swimsuit is still ribbed with reeds and rust-coloured sand. I take so many photographs, more than I will ever look at. They are stand ins for words that elude me.
poetry
The dead author did not write through summer. She needed the damp. Slick rock faces, feet sinking into sodden grasses, longer, darker nights.
(from Mrs S by K Patrick)
The writing process has its own hills and valleys, its shards of pine tree, its patchwork farmlands. I look outside my window at the unending layers of green surrounding Moniack Mhor. The landscape feels like an apt metaphor for what it feels like to be a poet sometimes. Steep inclines, jagged descents, rough bogland, and miles and miles of vibrant, rolling, grassland.
At the end of a long project, it can be difficult to imagine a new world of poems, a new manuscript, a new plot of land. Right now, prose is slipping through me and onto the page: messy, unadorned, meandering, ready to be shaped: I render the fog and its uncertain opacity. This feels new and hard, but that fricative challenge, that difficulty of not knowing something and needing to learn it, is important and meaningful.
But, I miss the poetry that will just not come. So, I work with a prompt. I find a document of prompts by Kelli Russell Agodon, put together for National Poetry Month, and start at the first one.
Grab the closest book. Go to page 29. Write down 10 words that catch your eye. Use 7 of the words in a poem. For extra credit have 4 of them appear at the end of a line.
I have a stack of books next to me, each of them as close as the next. Even though it might be cheating, I choose one of my favourites: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil. The ten words I choose from page 29 are begin, clear, space, write, stages, dances, June, sides, wake, licorice.
My first draft only includes four of the words June, clear, stages, licorice. And I eventually change June to July.
When the poem emerges, it’s like tension leaving the body. A brief reminder that yes, I can still write that ephemeral thing I love. I write what might be called a sonnet. It’s not necessarily rhyming, though I ease into the linebreaks that amplify certain sounds, asking them to mirror one another (stages and strange, for example). And there is a volta at the point of the couplet at the end, inspired by something Ocean Vuong said:
The more English I acquire, the further I am from my family.
Here’s a small excerpt from the work-in-progress: all my childhood vocabularies decompose.