“To me, place is about the relationship of distance-to-closeness. How connected someone feels to their national identity can be just as important as how direct or indirect a speaker is in a poem, or how straightforward or mysterious an image is.”
Night Watch
I never went to bed when I was told.
I’d come alive in the long quietness −
a sort of moonflower;
my face a rose,
white, petalled with misgivings
lulled to the wide-open window
where I was small enough to perch on the sill
wrapped in the duvet,
a sheep inside its own call of wool.
I loved the night’s cool hand on my face.
I had my eyes out for the cats
skulking under cars
while the street stretched out
beneath me in pearly relief
from the neighbours.
And the tea-stained moon
was a magnificent
pull of calm to read by.
I’d wonder where the odd car
whooshing along the main road
had to be at such an hour,
how the heart beating
to a different circadian rhythm
beats just as hard.
Nature is not always symmetrical.
The nostril of a sperm whale, for example,
is only on the left side of the head.
It is so lovely to have no calls or notifications,
to have nothing
but peaceful hours
sloping towards dawn
before the birds start
screaming under this
morning’s failing lodestar.
I was sent to my room so often
I learned to laugh,
offering my legs to the road
and calculating my death.
The house was never high enough −
slumped at the hill’s bottom
before the marsh-flats.
The brewery’s tower a steamship
in the distance, chugging
on the dark, the village
keeping itself to another
wash of sleep.
I am intrigued looking at this poem with how you use space. What inspired the indentations and line arrangement?
I started this poem as a response to a prompt based on a collage by the artist, Sarah-Jane Crowson. She draws on a range of paintings, mostly of women from the 16th-19th century, and superimposes these with lines from poems and desolate-looking landscapes. The collage I was inspired by features a woman with a flower for a head (I think it’s a peony) and she’s drifting over a seascape in front of a very large moon. There are butterflies flittering about on either side of her. For some reason something about the movement from right to left in the picture jumped out at me, as did the surreal image of the flower instead of a head. I was reminded of the many times I couldn’t sleep as a child and would sneak out of bed to sit on the windowsill and look out at the street for hours, defying every parent’s interminable wish for their child to go to bed when they’re told, and that’s when the first line popped up in my head. I wanted to capture the torn feelings of insomnia and also indulge how differently we perceive the world at night.
The mouthfeel of the poem and the gorgeous images create a dream-like feel – fitting for the content – but how important is musicality for you when writing poetry?
I’m not sure about musicality, in a song-song sense. I’ve tried writing poems to songs in place of their lyrics with miserable results. Having said that, I often listen to music while I read and write, and find it clouds-out distractions. I’m a sucker for R&B and Pop, and I’ve listened to the same songs every day for years. I suppose the songs operate as a sort of subconscious background for my thoughts at times. Looking at the lines in the poem, many of them do actually have the length of song lyrics, so maybe this is why. I try to be more conscious of rhythm, rather than musicality. How a hard or soft-sounding word slows the line down or speeds us up and encourages us further. There’s the sound-world of the poem that’s always a pleasure to create, using assonance and alliteration and so forth, like elements of an orchestra. Perhaps musicality is quite necessary!
This poem brings Wales to mind for me. Was it written about Wales or somewhere else and what does place mean to you in your poems?
I’m thrilled that it does that for you. It brings Wales to mind for me too. I was born in South Wales and raised in a village, in the same house until I was eighteen and moved away to England to study. This seems to have sealed Wales off in my mind right along with my childhood, and as an adult, I only get to come back for short stays with my family, when of course my own perceptions of the place and my connections to it fail and must be re-experienced, re-learned. To me, place is about the relationship of distance-to-closeness. How connected someone feels to their national identity can be just as important as how direct or indirect a speaker is in a poem, or how straightforward or mysterious an image is. In this poem, for example, I mention the ‘marsh-flats’ that branch out before my bedroom window, which look out towards the mouth of the River Severn. I suppose one way these inform the poem is in the line spacing, which functions in a similarly tidal, pushing and pulling motion. I was also thinking of Wales in a cultural sense as well. Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, the Welsh language was treated cavalierly by the teachers I had in school. Despite it being part of the curriculum it always existed on the fringes. Even though this is a poem written in English about Wales, I hope that something about a voice on the margins is present, and worked to bring forward what you felt to be the spirit of the place. I would love to learn Welsh properly as an adult. I hope one day I will…
Edward Heathman
Edward Heathman (he/him) grew up in South Wales and studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He has had poetry published in The Manchester Anthology, The Visual Verse Anthology, the Bluebird Anthology, the Ey Up anthology, and on Ink, Sweat & Tears. He is currently working on a poetry pamphlet centred around sleep disorders.
How I Write a Poem is our bi-monthly interview series digging in to the nitty-gritty of poetry writing. Explore the full series here.
