Rosemarie Corlett on how she writes a poem

“I don’t follow a skeleton, or pad out a structure, rather the poem emerges like a road lit by headlights.”

I never know what a poem will be about when I start writing it. And if it’s a successful poem, I won’t know what it’s about once it’s finished.
I write line by line, and find it very difficult to move to the next line unless the last one is exactly as it should be. In this sense, I don’t follow a skeleton, or pad out a structure, rather the poem emerges like a road lit by headlights. I learn about it as I go. I enjoy the risk, the potential for accidents and not knowing.

I remember hearing an Ella Fitzgerald interview; when asked how she retained such originality in her scat singing and improvisation, she explained ‘I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns’. I find that as I write a poem over days or weeks, it will wait in the wings as I go about my day, and I will begin to tune into little overheard phrases from bus rides, adverts, and conversations in waiting rooms: ‘angel hair pasta’, ‘a careless elegance’, ‘her dark hair against the white dress’. These little units of language take on strange importance and harmony, and as I play with placing them inside the poem, unexpected meanings arise.

And here, as a story or a message starts to emerge, I have to fight the will to tie the poem up in a bow, to decide what it’s about. I find it really important to remain in that place of curiosity, of attentive playing, of watching the poem unfold without too much interference. I remember hearing a talk by George Saunders where he advises writers to ‘keep themselves mystified’ because ‘this thing defies systemisation’. Indeed, if we arrive at a poem with the conclusions we came to from the last one, it never works. Our tools are poem specific, and always require risk.

If I’m stuck, it’s usually because I haven’t told the truth. By this I mean that I may have written about ‘a terrific yearning for connection’, when what I actually meant was ‘a terrific yearning for a storm so severe it leaves you deaf for a week’. As the vague abstraction ‘connection’ is replaced with the more honest concrete image, the poem regains momentum and can move forwards.
Finally, I frisk my verbs, frisk my adjectives, and become hysterically keen to produce, as Coleridge says ‘the best words in the best order’. I triple check to see if I have been glib or lazy, and I pour myself into revision as an act of love.

Rosemarie Corlett is a bilingual poet and associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Plymouth University. She studies a PhD in poetry and is currently working on a book of poems about flightless birds, remote Scottish islands and other curiosities. Her poetry has been published in Iota, Poetry Wales, Lighthouse Literary Journal and Guardian Faber.
Her work has recently been published in issue 54.2 of Poetry Wales.
Twitter: @RosemarieCorlet