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<\/p>\nWilliam and Dorothy Wordsworth\u2019s first glimpse of the sea was at Whitehaven on the Cumbrian coast; my hometown. They were visiting their paternal uncle Richard who was the town\u2019s Collector of Customs. Dorothy cried at the sight. In later life, William would regard the event as his first memory of his beloved sister\u2019s remarkable sensibility*. The Wordsworth children hailed from the market town of Cockermouth, fourteen miles inland. It was here they took the shells they had gathered on the beach that day and relived the sounds of the sea by placing them to their ears. But it thrills me to know they at least spent time \u2013 formative time \u2013 in my corner of the county. Indeed, William did actually live in Whitehaven for a spell in 1794.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s his portrait \u2013 brooding on Helvellyn (whose onomatopoeic name perfectly captures the mountain\u2019s perilously ridged summit) \u2013 that hangs above my writing desk. Our shared Cumbrianness is one connection that justifies the picture\u2019s place to me. The other is that most niche of literary subgenres, skate poetry. Albeit of the ice skating variety in Wordsworth\u2019s case, as opposed to skateboarding in mine. The sequence in The Prelude that has him gliding \u2018across the reflex of a star \/ That gleamed upon the ice\u2019 is to my knowledge the best-achieved poetic expression of (any form of) skating\u2019s fleeting sensation. My quest for anything anywhere near it in my own poems is ongoing. Having him watching over me as I write is both a comfort and a spur.<\/p>\n
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The room in which my writing desk sits is on the top floor of our house in Lewes, East Sussex. Up in the eves, but not \u2013 despite the term some bureaucratic estate agents and negligent surveyors tried to bestow upon it \u2013 a loft conversion. A period fireplace in the adjoining bedroom tells you this was an original storey of the house. It\u2019s more an outsized landing than a room. \u2018Hobby rooms\u2019 they\u2019re sometimes called. Almost fitting I suppose but alas, poetry is far more serious than that! A Velux window in the sloping roof reveals a mighty flintstone Anglican church to the east and, if you lean out far enough and look south, the town\u2019s Norman castle, high on its earthwork hill. (Cockermouth has a ruined Norman castle, too.) Between these two stone sentinels is a sort of deep valley of back gardens running down from the rear of a lofty Georgian terrace whose houses\u2019 windows, when lit from within, create an almost Dahlian world; you imagine a hundred and one dalmatians in woofing correspondence across the hedgerows at dusk. It\u2019s a beautiful view. I\u2019m very happy with it. I write in Microsoft Word on a modestly priced PC laptop. I\u2019m very happy with that, also. And I write in Times New Roman for reasons that require no explanation. I don\u2019t use line spacing until I sense a poem\u2019s completion nearing, at which point I go one-point-five. The transformation, from hunched, bunched block of text to air-filled, breathable poem is never not satisfying. It\u2019s tantamount to an endorphin hit. Writing poems is fun!<\/p>\n
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My writing process has changed markedly over the years. I made the switch from manual typewriter to laptop (second-hand Mac until the new PC) about seven or eight years ago. As an itinerant English skater in America, I\u2019d often buy a typewriter from a local thrift store if I was going to be in one place for a while, then leave it with whomever I was staying upon moving on; the heavy old things don\u2019t exactly lend themselves to packing light. One machine though, a beautiful deep-red Royal I received as a birthday present, did stay with me and made the trip home across the Pond as carry-on luggage. Too valuable to abandon: at a repair shop (jammed typebars) one day in Eagle Rock in LA the proprietor blurted out its would-be value on the vintage market, then had the cheek to offer me a fraction of that price to take it off my hands. No thanks, pal.<\/p>\n
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Working on typewriters, I used to create draft upon draft of poems, and keep them all too, thinking every original image or technical solution or line-break variant they contained would be crucial during the editing process. No thought left behind! The shift to a laptop has led to a less ponderous writing practice, as well as a more productive one. Perhaps the most notable shift in how I write though has been the ceasing of writing drunk. I don\u2019t know where this impulse came from as a young poet, but it\u2019s a mug\u2019s game. It creates a too-insular and blinkered perspective, feeds sentimentality, limits one to writing in the wee hours, prevents any kind of routine, and blocks craft despite the protestations spoken by its voice of inebriated \u2018inspiration\u2019.<\/p>\n
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* Jonathan Bate \u2018Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who Changed the World\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like a cross between the Guardian\u2019s Writers\u2019 rooms and MTV Cribs, our \u2018Where I write\u2019 series brings you up close and personal with the furniture of our authors\u2019 lives to discover where \u2013 and how \u2013 the magic happens. In this episode, former pro skateboarder turned poet Olly Todd shares the view from his writing desk in Lewes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,317],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20808"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20808"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20822,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20808\/revisions\/20822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}