Writing day? Most days I do no writing, although everything I do professionally has to do with writing - readings, workshops, schools visits, the odd radio thing. It's what pays the rent, seeing as the royalties from poems are so pitiable for all but a few of us practitioners (I keep hoping I'm about to join the bigger earners, but I'm not taking a loan on the strength of this).
And maybe it's a blessing I'm so often away from my writing desk, as if I had to sit down every day and write I'd quickly be driven mad. Poems, in my experience, come along very seldom - since finishing my book, A Smell of Fish, last May I have written six poems, two of them this year. And the good thing about poems is they're portable - they can be done on the run. I carry a notebook with me always. Many of my poems have come into being on trains or in hotel rooms. Of the two this year, the first was written in Geneva, as a spin-off from a workshop I was running - although I should say that the fact that I was so close to the Black Forest, where I'd gone to college 20 years before, had as much to do with the poem's genesis as the workshop.
The second had a more complicated spawning in that it arose out of a big educational project I'm doing for the Barbican Centre, in London. This involved three days of workshops in the Barbican in January with 700 children from local schools, all writing about their hopes and fears for the future. I then had to take away what they produced and distil it into a poem that would be used as a libretto for a piece of music the composer Alasdair Nicolson would come up with, after workshops with the same children.
So I went through the children's work and picked out the most memorable images and ideas, and took these away with me to Australia at the end of February. I was going over there to appear at the Adelaide Festival, and would be away for two and a half weeks. The libretto was due in at the end of March. I first worked on the piece at a retreat we visiting writers were taken on in the McLaren Vale vineyards. All I got was disparate scraps and jottings, nothing that looked like cohering. I continued after I got to Adelaide - it was so hot there that I had to dive frequently into the air-conditioned hotel room, and the recalcitrant draft would always be waiting for me. I kept tinkering with it - William Carlos Williams said a verse maker should never be in a hurry - and gradually the piece started coming together, until one afternoon I had something I felt I could try on some of the other poets at the festival. They gave it the thumbs up and I could relax somewhat.
I still had to have it okayed by the important people back in the Northern hemisphere, though, so after making a few further small changes, I faxed it to the Barbican. They liked it, and so does Alasdair, so I can now forget about writing days for a while and go out on the road with my new book.
Matthew Sweeney's new collection A Smell of Fish is published by Cape Poetry; £8 in UK. He will be reading at the Verbal Arts Centre, Derry, on Thursday April 27th, 8 p.m.; during the Co Roscommon, Strokestown Poetry Festival at The Dun Maeve Centre, Friday 28th, 8 p.m.; and with Kwame Dawes during Cuirt 2000 on Saturday 29th at The Town Hall, Galway, 8.30 p.m.