It Starts With the Echo of Hooves...

Photo: Keith Morris

Day Two of the BAP/National Poetry Competition UK Blog Tour. Here's yesterday's Introduction, if you missed it.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, our blogger for today, has published three collections, Rockclimbing in Silk (Seren, 2001), Not in These Shoes (Picador, 2008) and most recently Banjo (Picador, 2012). Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. 'Ponting' won second prize in the 2011 competition just before its publication in Banjo, which selected by the Telegraph as one of the UK's best new poetry books of summer 2012.

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Ponting

In the end we turned him into a verb:

to pont meaning to pose in ice and snow

 

until frozen. On the voyage south he’d be

tilting plates in the darkroom, in one hand

 

the developing dish, in the other a basin

of vomit. One minute he’d arrange us

 

in groups for the cinematograph, then rush

to the ship’s side... (read the rest)

....

Samantha writes about a flurry of activity, and the reality of the writer's shed:

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Sometimes at a canter, sometimes at a gallop, I hear a strong poem coming (or what turns out to be a strong poem) months beforehand, until the sound of hooves is so loud that the poem is at my doorstep, demanding to be written. This is what happened with Ponting. I had never received a poetry prize before...

  ...so the telephone call from the Poetry Society in January this year was a lovely surprise. And it was even nicer to be published in Poetry Review for the first time. The fact that Ponting resonated with the three judges gave me the much-needed confidence to embark on my next group of poems.

Ponting took about two weeks to write (including research time) and twenty drafts. Then I left it in the drawer for six months. I always think it’s a good idea to leave your poem in the drawer for as long as you can. If I get twitchy about opening the drawer I start work on a new poem to distract myself from the temptation to coo over a piece of work which is so riddled with faults that I cannot even see there is no central image around which the poem can cohere, that I have not paid attention to making the most of my line breaks and that my narrative thread is so weak as to be non-existent.

In the wake of the prizegiving good things happened. I found myself racing from one poetry festival to the next to give readings. At Ledbury Festival I read three times over the course of a weekend, mainly from my new collection, Banjo, which came out a couple of months after the National Poetry Competition results and included Ponting. At readings many people have said how much the poems have meant to them. I enjoy giving readings. I find that speaking the poems out loud can bring something new to them, even to me.

Now I am back in the shed, scratching out words in the cold, disturbed only by the tapping of a loose tile on the shabby roof, reminding me that the reason I’m sitting in a clapboard lean-to is because of an echo of hooves I heard months ago.

You can follow the whole blog tour on the Poetry Society UK's website, and selected posts will also appear in the Huffington Post.