Here on Planet Julie, birds are singing in my miniature formal garden and I'm observing a wren on my globe artichoke. I'm not so sure that people trying to make poems actually have a "Writing Day". Unless you are W.H. Auden, it's more likely to be a "Writing Hour", after which you'll probably read what you just wrote, crumple it into a ball and toss it into the bin.
There is a remark of Henri Michaux to the effect that "the merest ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it", which seems very true. Poems have to sort of sneak up on you, tap you on the shoulder as you're waiting at the check-out counter in Tesco. So my writing day is taken up by trying to pretend I'm an employee at Trinity College library or that I'm a commuter on the 7 a.m. bus or an orderly citizen turtle-waxing my car. Most of my poetry work is undercover. You need to keep your eyes open and do an awful lot of eavesdropping in this line of business. In short, you need to blend in. Anybody who announces "I'm a poet" isn't one.
Sure, as a "person who wishes to one day write a poem", I have my little eccentricities: I write with my father's pen on which he etched his name, I doodle in the margins, I am not exactly a people-person. I have no idea why I ever became someone who wishes to one day write a poem, never having read poetry when I was growing up. The most important attribute needed for poetry is a sense of how odd it is to be a humanoid. If you don't wake up each morning on a foreign planet, you can forget poetry as a pastime. You may take all the writing courses you want, but the essential ingredient cannot be taught.
Quite a lot of stationery supplies are needed in the poetry game - various-sized envelopes, jiffy bags, air mail stickers, staples, tape, designer paperclips: it's a jungle. I also have an in-house personal poetry coach. He tells me which poems need to shape up and lose the flab and which ones are hopeless cases. He hands me essential reading items and keeps me up to speed on literary developments; he can spot a typo at a hundred yards. He is a great cheerleader, too, when some lame-brained editor has had the temerity to turn down something of "genius". There are days when you stop pretending to be Miss Ordinary and instead act the writer at a school or arts centre. It's a great feeling if someone comes up to say they like your poems. It means that all the bird-watching and commuting and hiding under the bed and collecting paperclips with stripes on them has proved successful.
Julie O'Callaghan's latest collection, No Can Do, has just been published by Bloodaxe