An unlived life, eleven pebbles in

Fairytales and time: another peek inside my notebook

Where do poems come from? One part melancholy to three parts curiosity, more often than not. I’m only speaking for myself. Train journeys through unfamiliar places. The aftermath of having listened, or listened well, or listened to the cadences of a language you don’t know fluently. Music. Strange convergences-of-the-twain. If I have ‘an idea’ for a poem, I often mistrust it, or at least I do if it arrives singly. I’m waiting for a second thought to connect with the first and pollinate it. Something that troubles the initial idea, perhaps.

Waiting for a second idea. Words on walls: the backdrop is always half of the image.

I love moments of serendipity that come from encountering other artists. My next collection circles around fairytales and the representation of the wicked stepmother. In Berlin this weekend, I met the New York based poet Rachel Zucker and we talked a lot about motherhood, storytelling and mind vs body in the origins of poetry (whether indeed there’s any ‘versus’ at all when it comes to writing). Rachel told me to read ‘Happily’ by Sabrina Orah Mark, a book of memoir-essays on a life told through fairytales. I was in love from the first page, the author’s account of a lost childhood book:

“I am ready to read all the fairytales in a book my mother insists never existed. Fairy tales about witches with long knotted tongues or children baked into bread or daughters who run so far away from home they grow a second heart. But I can’t find the book….. It’s for me to look for and never find. There is a path of pebbles inside that book I will never follow. There is an unlived life that begins eleven pebbles in.”