A Writer's Process: Sarah de Nordwall

Sarah was a winner of the Wild Words Summer Solstice Competition. You’ll find her winning entry below. But first, she talks about her creative process…

When people ask me, as they occasionally do – So how do you write poems? I tend to reply, perhaps a little glibly – ‘Poems are easy to write, it’s the rest of life that’s hard’. And although that might sound a little ‘throw away’, I think it’s true. But perhaps it’s true because the poems are really the fruit of life.

They blossom when the spring of realisation makes its mysterious and yet long-prepared-for appearance. The important thing is to be ready for them. Pen in hand, pen beside the bed, pen in the rucksack; it’s the constant companion to everyday delights and everyday demise.

It’s also the key to turn when unsolvable pain requires a new room to move into. Only the poem seems to unlock the space. In this way, poems are like extensions – they grow your house to accommodate your experiences, your observations and your need to communicate with the world in a way that nothing else can achieve.

But how is it done? Generally in the morning, first thing, capturing the waking revelations, freshly processed by dreams. Also on the move, as I spend at least 3 to 6 hours a day on public transport, overground and underground. It’s a perfect time for rumination and so a poem often jumps into my head as I’m heading down the escalator and it will not be denied. Many are the poems written around the edge of train tickets and the back of programmes. Now it’s often on the Notes Section of my phone, swiftly emailed to myself in case of phone loss, followed by editing at home.

Poems also grow like root vegetables slowly underground, fed by reading and discussing, mulching and musing. Then suddenly they seem to choose their own form and appear when I face the daily morning pages. They come like gifts or healing herbs to soothe the heart and provide a Just So word that sums it up. There is such a satisfaction in having said it just how it was.

Writing always makes me smile with the gratitude of having received something.

It’s the clearest evidence I’ve experienced of being part of a larger mystery - this strange and hybrid human nature on the edge between matter and spirit. Here we are, unsure how consciousness arises from the material we share with flowers and coal, puzzling out the source of words, that perhaps were there, long before it all began.

If I choose a classical form, such as a villanelle, it’s like speaking a foreign tongue – one can delight in taking on a slightly different personality, just for the time in which you speak in that language. It not only pours itself into that singular form but transforms itself accordingly.

I like editing, but always keep originals because editing is dangerous. It can ruin the original music. One change requires many others to keep the shape alive. But for me as a performance poet, I find the real work begins when I create a show - choosing the story to tell with ‘that particular constellation of poems. In fact, just like a constellation, the story you tell depends how you choose to join the dots between the poems – and what stories you use to link them. In this way I’ve also written my poetry book, with stories in between, since context can make all the difference to whether a person can enter in.

In choosing how to begin to write, I also love games such as Paint Chip Poetry or Haikubes. I enjoy the laying out of the coloured cards or the rolling of the cubes. Fun is a great warm up, and chance is a remarkable friend to inspiration, but the truly good stuff comes insistently from the depths when summoned by the heart awoken, by true delight or sorrow. There’s magic in it and grace. I never tire of its romance – because there is always something undeniably real at the end of the last full stop, that came from one world into this one. And you invited it in! And that is why words will always carry a taste and a scent of the Wild.

Sons of Encouragement

The surprise of seeds still far exceeds

The weight of imagery heaped upon them.

The shock of them still forces its way

Up through concrete clichés into light.

You told me at the party

That you could not find the time to write

Your council job, your talent for distraction

Your novel and your life unwritten

And so I asked for something simple.

You claimed your skill had once been sonnets-

They were easy.

Really?

Good, the deal was struck.

A sonnet a day by Whatsapp

till the block was overturned.

And here they are.

I listen

Having overslept all morning

On the mountain of the week’s exhaustion

I look out on the vista

That your 7 poems bring

Majestic as the hills of Rome

Each springing from a seed of thought you might have flicked away

Impatient that it was not yet

The book you’d write ‘one day’..

Yet here your sonnets lie

In digital alignment on this thread

And worlds arise from every 14 lines

Which never would have lived

Had we not met.