How A
Poem Gets Made
The germ is a phrase, let’s say ‘twenty-six miles across
the sea,’ that comes within a fog of recent associations, a background noise
that only requires tuning-in to. I don’t think as much as focus on the words
that murmur through me, an ongoing narrative, like a baby chattering itself to
sleep. It’s a making-sense, a structuring, a reforming and a stretching. Like
how dough rises and you can pull it into nameless shapes. I’ll slam it against
a wall. What I see is a deckchair, the stripes on that deckchair: Why stripes?
What has been done to me? It’s not my image, it’s a postcard from somewhere,
but that’s what I can see, and I’m seeing my country floating off across the
water, festival music twirling alongside on the wind. I’m seeing leaves of
trees behind a faint shudder of heat rising. A fata morgana. Tarmac. There is
nearly always tarmac; it lines my dreams. Whatever book I first read the
word-phrase fata morgana in. It doesn’t matter if what I remember is
accurate, only that it leads on to other things, all that chaff can be stamped
out in the aftermath. An oasis. The way we don’t always look up what words
mean, allowing place names, band names, surnames to slide on and off our
relaxing bodies on the beach. I start with a figure in a landscape, there is nearly
always a figure melting into the tarmac on the beach. I tug their arm, pull on
whatever article they happen to be reading, slap the face awake, twist its
history into my own stranded interpretation. Words like chains, both links and
restrictions, until I’m ground to a halt in what I hope is a worthy place. If
not, plow on. Sand over boots, inside shoes, cast them off, the burning grains
under the softest most unknown part of us. I won’t get my toes out in the
middle of a board game. Who lies on a blanket in the middle of an inner-city
carpark anyway? Can’t we take back our surfaces? Once, in Norfolk, the hot
road, new and mallable, like an origin story. Volcanoes of motorway. And then
I’m full of enough raw lava. I stick my hand in to the warm rocks, ignore the
tourists striding past my crumpled melodrama. I like it down here where the
theoretical leaves are, rinsed with Beckett, Perec, Kafka, and with all the
preferably women I’m currently gagging in. I’m down here in my class and my
past trying to rake it all pageward. You want form? You want skill? I can only
polish up what the turned-over stones are revealing. I’ve got termites. I’ve
got small tiny things. Ferns, etc. and every time I’ve ever walked past them.
I’ve got the first tomato I chopped in order to feed myself at aged seventeen.
Like a scene from Ghost. Words that as an adult have lost their
importance. I’m finding them in the grips of my trainers, bringing them into
the house. Piles and piles of discarded incidents, which I’m stirring up into a
thick soup. Like I used to do with shampoos and gels in some ancient
lived-through bathroom that in my remembered architecture now sits where the
kitchen should have been.
Lydia Unsworth is the author
of two collections of poetry: Certain
Manoeuvres (KFS, 2018) and Nostalgia
for Bodies (Winner, 2018 Erbacce
Poetry Prize), and two chapbooks: My
Body in a Country (Ghost City Press, 2019) and I
Have Not Led a Serious Life (above / ground press, 2019). Her latest chapbook, Throw the Towel In, will be
released by KFS Press in 2020. Recent work can be found in Ambit, para.text, Tears in the Fence, Banshee, Blackbox Manifold and others. Manchester / Amsterdam. Twitter: @lydiowanie
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