This isn’t live as in live TV but it is live in that I’ve written and posted my drafts as I go — so the process is transparent.
One of the photos I used as a prompt to help generate the poem.
One of the things I do when I’m writing is read other poetry books. I write down quotes and snippets that stand out or relate to my train of thought..
When I set the Hawk Prompt I also picked out this quote by Carolyn Forche, but when I wrote my rough draft I didn't respond to this, although I find that sound is very closely connected to the emotional tenor of my work.
Now as work on this edit I’ve returned to my original notes/free write. I rarely write poem drafts in lineated form. The messier my first draft the more likely it is to produce something worth working on.
I realise also I'm back on a subject I've been avoiding: grief. I don't want to bang on about my angst - but this is where the emotional heart seems to lie. I also picked up Sharon Olds' One Secret Thing in the library. Sometimes I find her work claustrophobic (if brilliant) but reading the first poem in the book 'EVERYTHING' that opens 'Most of us are never conceived./Many of us are never born -/we live in a private ocean for hours,/weeks... really heartened me and gave me the permission I needed to keep writing about this personal subject.
Re-reading my early scrawl I can see that the opening I’d originally marked for deletion, may just be where the poem needs to move towards: ‘I am most interested in the feet and claws’. In the notes above, it’s my son’s feet that I move towards.
The next step is to think about whether this is one or two poems. Is it the hawk or the child? Or is it hawk and child? Now I’ve finished scanning pages I’m going to go back to my notebooks for a bit, see what I get next.
Showing this kind of rough edit is uncomfortable I have to say: this is definitely in my discard pile. It's also disconcerting, changing my mind in public like this, but that's the constant part of the editing process. Trying new things. But it's interesting as a process: to identify the true ambition of the poem - not in terms of its syntactical realisation - but in the 'what does it want be/do' kind of way.
Yes, I definitely think it’s two poems. This new verse arrangement seems to have honed it down a bit – it feels more right like this.
I realise that what I was chasing here is the idea of being able to see an animal very close up - a wild animal. I once saw this fox that had just been run over, and it was all still perfect. It was fascinating. That moment when something's not long dead and still has the life in it. That's different to this, but this idea of proximity - as in Wing - is still there.
