Poetry and horses are two of the longstanding loves of my life. In many ways, writing a poem is like training a horse. You start with this wild, beautiful, thrumming pulse and somehow you need to channel it, contain it, without destroying its essential spark.

Sometimes I write a poem in response to a prompt. Other times, lines or ideas bubble up in my head when I am washing up or walking my dogs. Once I get a line, if there’s no automatic flow, I gather lots of sensory details around the subject until there comes a point when it feels ready to shape into a poem. This is a bit like catching a wary horse. You cannot just walk up to it. As a flight animal, walking directly at them makes you a threat, and they will run away snorting. You have to walk towards a horse in a curve, with your eyes averted. If you get close and the horse turns its head away, you reach for its shoulder or withers and give them a gentle scratch. Slowly, you work your way up their neck until they turn their head towards you.

Poems also respond well to patience. Even when I have written a couple of drafts, I do my best to refuse to know what it’s about. My controlling tendencies hate this. However, my controlling tendencies are not good poets. When I let them take charge, they over-edit and dampen that essential spark or rush the ending.

Some poems come out nearly whole on the first draft. Others take years. I started writing ‘Kill Your Speed’ in 2010. At the time I was renting the top floor of a farmhouse. The family that lived in the bottom half had farmed that land for nearly 500 years, and had never thrown anything remotely useful away in those 500 years. I wrote down all the images of decay that I could see on the farm in one sitting, and as I did, the character of the farmer popped into my head. I soon had a finished poem, and it got shortlisted a few times but never quite made the cut. Frustrated, I put it in a drawer for about five years and focused more on spoken word pieces, as I love performing. I got the poem out a couple of years ago and showed it to my friend, Vanessa Lampert. She suggested a few edits, including cutting the last two lines. That removal elevated the poem. It opened out the end into a sense of quivering on a threshold, rather than an absolute.

‘Old White Horse’ came out of an exercise I did with Malika Booker. She had us sketch our childhood home and then slowly work around it, jotting down notes about memories attached to particular places. I had already written a lot about my childhood, and frankly thought I was out of material. But this exercise helped me tap into a deeper level of memory. When I drew our old stableyard, I was stung by the image of this old horse tied up outside in the height of summer. The specific details, together with the strong sense of guilt I still held around it, created the chemistry to produce this poem, about regret, and the necessary selfishness of youth.

Unless was inspired by a NaPoWriMo prompt. Although I write five or six days a week, I dislike the pressure of having to write a new poem every day. It doesn’t give me time to process or mull over one before I’m on to the next. Nevertheless, I always pick out a couple of prompts from NaPoWriMo, and this one was to write about a favourite novel, without looking at it. Unless by Carol Shields immediately sprang to mind; it had a profound effect on me when I first read it in 2003, and I had re-read it every year for the next decade. I have had a near-photographic memory all my life, so I was horrified when I couldn’t remember the main character’s name. It was my first experience of menopausal brain fog. It was doubly ironic, because although I loved the story, I was, at first, contemptuous of the middle-aged main character, who was frustrated with her encroaching invisibility as an ageing woman, and at how little progress feminism seemed to have made. In 2003, I was still convinced I would see complete equality in my time. Now I am a similar age to Reta, the main character, I think we would be friends if we met in real life.

See the site tomorrow to read Tina’s response to ‘Unless’ by Carol Shields.

Tina Sederholm is an Oxfordshire-based poet, performer and editor. Her two collections, Everything Wrong With You Is Beautiful, and This is Not Therapy, are published by Burning Eye. Creator of five solo spoken word shows, she has performed everywhere from The Royal Albert Hall and Edinburgh Fringe to her local aquarium. When she is not writing, she can be found riding racehorses or walking her Boxer dogs across the Cotswold hills.