Every poet, to an extent, lives their creative life in fragments. The unfinished lines that pour out of notebooks, free writes, workshop pages, phone memos, pub conversations, scribbles on the back of the hand. They threaten to engulf with the weight of all the things we haven’t quite figured out how to say.
I am a notorious under-editor. I’d love to cry perfectionism but I’m sure it’s largely laziness. Under that, though, I do have a sense that all the creative energy is lost from a poem after the initial burst of writing. There is a strange feeling that if a piece isn’t finished in the first iteration, it’s lost the chance to be anything whole. That the door has closed, and the only option is to move onto something shiny and new and yet to disappoint me.
This is rubbish, of course. It’s no big secret that the most talented and successful writers are the ones who commit to reworking, returning again and again, with a fine-toothed comb, with a new approach, with another person’s perspective. For poetry, this often looks like an hour spent honing ten words, twisting yourself in knots over which phrase fits best or where to break the line. Every poem I would consider ‘finished’ (a cautious and arrogant declaration at the best of times) comes with a graveyard of half-written sentences at the bottom of the page which I can’t quite bring myself to remove. A chorus of discarded voices, waiting for their turn, clamouring to be subbed back into the game.
Often the way to open up this editing process is through collaboration. Some of my favourite conversations have come from the ridiculous distances we will cover to find the right thing to say, and the shared frustration or ecstasy with the destination. Once a friend and I spent the majority of an editing session agonising about which final word best finished the delicate thread that she had woven throughout a poem. When she hit on the perfect finishing point, we gave a collective and highly self-indulgent gasp. From across the room, a quiet voice piped up “no wonder poets take so long to publish anything”.
Sometimes it’s less about taking the time to edit, and more about waiting for the correct time to write it. Topics will pull at you for months before you finally get out the piece that conjures up everything you’ve been trying to say. When it happens, it feels like sorcery, like a blessing from some cursed god of language. It’s not – it’s just patience and perspective, and a little bit of poetic license. Sometimes you have to come back with fresh eyes, fresh hands. And sometimes you’re just not the person who’s meant to write it.
There are specific experiences and ideas that haunt a lot of my writing. The wonderful poet and writing tutor Megan Falley once told us to create a list of moments that we are ‘obsessed’ with. The events, mundane or life-altering, personal or global, which have constantly preoccupied us. That we think about every time we sit down to write. That we have been trying and failing to write about for years.
The list itself is firmly locked away: many people I know, and many I don’t, are featured at some point in varyingly graphic detail. But it’s possibly the most practical writing advice I ever received. At its root, it means: figure out what you keep trying to write about, and keep it safe for a time when you’re ready to reach for it. Even if it’s not explicit, I notice these moments popping up throughout my unfinished writing. And more notably, I spot when they’re missing. When the thing I really want to explore is too far to grasp.
With all this said, I recently took a tour through my fragments. The half-lines and semi-stanzas that never made it any further. It’s a far more extensive archive than any of my finished pieces, and far, far more daunting. The mission here is to find the common threads between a few of them, and go some way towards rectifying the abandonment that I have wreaked on so many words. These common threads are easy, of course: I could list them without looking. They’re nostalgia, family, embodiment, femininity, loss, nature, past, future. The vast topics that I, along with the rest of the world, cannot stop writing about.
Take these, scribbled at various points but always struggling to leave people and places behind:
Or the many lines about imagined lovers and intimacy and broken conversation:
Or the lines about time passing, about age, about trying to claw everything back:
On girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, lineage, body, silence:
And family, and love, and all the ways that the two are inseparable:
And of course, there are countless phrases that mean nothing at all. I just liked how they sounded:
If I were to create a kind of Franken-poem out of these pieces, to try and heave some of these threads together and give them new life, it would look something like this:
When the water comes, it is music to her bones.
Take a sea-sponge to her pretty skull and erode
the excess. Leave a moment to linger
on the narrow of the wrist, the sculpted neck,
the honeyed broken curve of her lips. Kiss corals
across each organ. Cleanse anything angry, aching,
ancient. Ask and watch her spin and unspin
the waves, trip over salted tongue. She will tell
you there is no place like a home where no one
lives any more. She will tell you about
old names in new rooms, the man in the tongue
of the big city and the boy who taught her
to be seen but never touched. One day
the seas of her breath ran dry and she turned
into him over and over. The tide has always lived
here. She is leaving again but there is kelp treaded
into the carpets and saltstains lining the landlord
white walls and the horizon stings blood
orange. When the ocean comes, watch
her buried in softness and wet rot
and stripped white bone. Leave her wild.
Now every workshop leader will tell you no disclaimers, but this still needs a lot of work. There are probably five different strands of poem in there somewhere. I’m no stranger to shoehorning lines where they don’t belong just because I think they’re worth sharing – but it’s rare to build entirely from the leftover crumbs.
But there’s a reason I wrote these ideas down in the first place, and trawling through years of absent-minded train thoughts and notebook scraps has inspired me. Past writings are part scrapheap, part time capsule: a reminder of everything you failed to work on, and a reminiscence on all the forgotten things that mattered to you at one point. I’d encourage everyone to sit down at some point and dive into their own scrapbook.
I’ll leave these musings with a piece started at the Roundhouse Poetry Collective and (true to form) left un-worked. Maybe it, too, will find a home at some point:
Let’s start with a teapot, gut hollowed with rust,
Found abandoned on King Street and gathering dust,
A cuckoo clock which time has all but forgot,
A directionless compass crawled over by rot.
A couple of sonnets, a failed goodbye,
The kite no one ever remembered to fly.
In the centre a beachstone, rubbed shiny with age,
Three moulded programmes from a year on the stage,
And in hardback, chained up and soft-lined with lead,
The unfinished poems, crumbled, forever unread.
Ellen Waters is a Manchester-born poet whose work has been featured in Viral Verses: Art in Exceptional Times, Indigo Literary Journal, and JFA Human Rights Journal. She is a Writing Squad alum and an upcoming member of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, and has worked for multiple creative writing charities expanding access to the arts. She has written with The Poetry Society and New Writing North, worked on a poetry engagement project at The Yorkshire Museum, and co-edited two literary magazines for Northern creatives.
Instagram: @ellen.aurora
