I have a perfectly good desk. I bought it from a dealer in Thomas Street in Dublin who, for some reason, thought I was a doctor. He asked me about his bad back. I told him to give up smoking and he gave me £20 off a nice pine table which by now, 12 years on, hardly ever gets used. So much for the healing powers of poetry.
I think where I can: in the car, at the sink, in the pub, in the garden, in the bed. Poetry suits me: I have a bad memory, but I find even I can carry a line or an image on the run. Later, I will write it down, and tinker with it on paper until it starts to look like something I could use. I do this at night, with the children in bed and the day's more clamorous duties under wraps. As soon as I can, (and it's never as soon as I want), I take down my green notebook and practice there for whatever time the work seems to demand. Some days I don't get near it, but that doesn't mean there's been no space for poetry in that day. Poetry makes its own space. Although it relies on being written, it also rests in the unscribbled margins of the day.
So much of poetry is listening. For a word, a cadence, a rhyme, a rhythm, a link. Listening is easy: it won't have either silence or solitude, which are things I couldn't honestly supply. Reading is harder, though no less essential. If I'm not reading, and not in contact with other people's poems, I find it that much harder to bridge the gap between the daily round of jobs and cares, and my own wish to write. I know the only way I will become a better poet is to read more good poems, and so I usually carry a book with me, to dip into when I can. I like to read the one poem over and over, if it's good, and often find myself walking to work in the rhythm of another poet's lines.
Poetry is always there, ticking over, but in truth, I don't really have a "writing day". To paraphrase Padraig Flynn, I have two small children, two jobs and a life. To spend a day writing poems would not be possible, for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is the bottom line - people pay you to teach, to read, to talk, to review, to help other people do it - to do almost anything, in fact, but write the stuff.
But it's not just that. To set myself down at a desk from nine to five would be an ongoing declaration that I'm writing poems all the time. I enjoy the furtive nature of my writing. I never tell anyone what I'm writing until the piece is finished: it grows, as it were, in the dark. As the process quickens and the poem gathers momentum, I steal time where I can to let it happen. Writing a poem is seldom a linear process. It's like mercury, hardening and darting off. The pursuit of its many directions is the fun of the thing. I suspect my poems will always be written at the edge of this pursuit, where they can surprise my life and give me something to think about.
Vona Groarke's second collection Other People's Houses has just been published by The Gallery Press