Behind the Pen: Pilgrimage

a poem, a process, some progress

Behind the Pen is an idea I’ve been mulling over for a while. While I appreciate the Death of the Author theory, I’m terribly nosy and often want to ask writers about the stories behind their poems and books. I’m always wondering what’s happening in other people’s heads. 

At a poetry reading I was at last weekend, an audience member asked the poets about providing context for the poems. Each of the poets had introduced their poems with a little context, and she was asking about including such notes in a book. It’s such a debated topic, and I can see why poets choose to let the poems speak for themselves. In the book I’ll leave the poems to do their own work, but we’re not in the book, and I know myself I love a bit of biographical detail, a little more intimacy with the writer.

This may be a once off, we’ll see, but I hope it will become a series of essays on writing, taking specific poems or extracts as a jumping off point. Demystifying the creative process a little, there’ll be no lessons on craft or anything in this series, just reflections and expansions. Speaking how I would with writer friends over a pint while we tear our own creative psyches to pieces.

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I’m editing my first full-length collection of poetry. I’ve been saying this for a few years, but right now I have it printed on my desk, pen close by, scribbles all over the pages. This comes ten years after I published my first poem, the summer of 2015, at which point I’d been writing poetry ‘seriously’ for four years. It has been a slow process, and yet, with weeks to go before my deadline, I still feel a simultaneous sense of panic (Not yet! It’s too soon!) and urgency.

Poetry is where I find a deep sense of understanding. In reading and writing poetry, I give myself more grace than in any other form. I allow for a girlish sincerity to underline even the lines of dry wit.

The poem I want to share today took years to settle into its current form. It is rooted in the last glows of girlhood, I fell pregnant a few months after it was written, and my focus shifted so entirely that I no longer feel a claim on girlhood. I’m also in my thirties now, but the twenty four year old who wrote this poem was still captivated by the kind of romanticism, the self-indulgence and complete absorption in tragic beauty that comes at a special time in life, and should, in its own way, be cherished.

Two parts of this poem were originally published in Poetry Ireland Review edited by Eavan Boland (an honour I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from.) The full five part sequence was later published in Icarus, the Trinity College literary journal. I want to share the poem, some background to it, and why it still brings me a melancholy joy.

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been besotted with Wuthering Heights. I’m the sort of person that becomes obsessed with a book or idea, and as a teenager this was Wuthering Heights. Perhaps it was the doomed romance between terrible people. Perhaps it was the ghostliness, the landscape which reminded me so much of the desolate bogs of home, or a the monomania that I related to so strongly. In the way that we may always hold a special place in our hearts for our teenage love affairs, this book has stayed with me.

Plath’s illustration of Top Withins, the house thought to have inspired the setting for Wuthering Heights.

For my nineteenth birthday my mother and I journeyed to Haworth. An Aerlingus flight to East Midlands, and a rented car across the English countryside to a cottage so cosy it may well have been illustrated. I spent three days exploring the moors, in love with heartbreak and the idea of being a poet.