PETER UALRIG KENNEDY

HOW I WRITE
​ Peter Ualrig Kennedy writes on his work

What an opportunity to contribute to Janice and Dónall’s new blog, with “no pressure and no deadline”!   Sometimes people have indeed asked how do I write a poem.  A question for which I have had no ready answer, except to say that when an idea pops into my head, I write it down.  No pressure, but the first morning after receiving the invitation, I woke up and grabbed a sheaf of scrap paper – mostly the backs of old envelopes – and wrote down roughly what follows.

In my head it seems that I am always speaking to myself, building word pictures, looking for allusions, searching for similes, words tumbling over themselves.  Such trains of thought are frequently evanescent, they fade as a dream fades on waking – unless there is pen and paper to hand.  Which is exactly what is happening to these present thoughts which I am writing down while they are fresh and new.  If I do not write them down, they may disappear, floating away downstream to wherever forgotten thoughts go to, leaving no trace.  In trying to describe what happens when I write, I am attempting to make concrete that which may not be something that can be made concrete; in sculpting my thoughts into some semblance of solidity I may be manufacturing a chimera.  Is this truly how my thought processes and writing work in practice, or am I making solid a fantasy?  Perhaps everybody thinks in this way, but how am I to tell?  Perhaps I am a muddle-headed romantic.  Perhaps I have been fooling myself that my thoughts and my writings are of some significance when in fact they are the empty droolings of a literary naif.  Here begin to crowd in the anxieties, the self-defeating worries that these musings – or more importantly the verses, the stories, the poems that I write – are of little interest, of no merit.  Why should anyone wish to read them?  Other writers, other poets, I suppose, may feel this way some of the time.  Or most of the time.  But we still plough on, bringing our words into the lives of others.
 
And here, gentle reader, I can vow solemnly to you that the preceding paragraph has turned out to be almost exactly as I set it down early that morning.  A real life demonstration of how it’s done …

Peter Ualrig Kennedy is the author of Songs for a Daughter and the lead organiser at POETRY WIVENHOE ​http://poetrywivenhoe.org