Drop-in by Hilary Otto

Today yet another talented poet from Hedgehog Poetry Press, Hilary Otto to reflect on a poem from her debut pamphlet, Zoetrope.

Thanks so much, Nigel, for this opportunity to go a bit deeper into the process behind one of my poems in my recent pamphlet from Hedgehog, Zoetrope.

I have chosen a poem called ‘Outside the frozen room’, which was written in response to Alex Dimitrov’s poem ‘January’ from his collection Love and Other Poems.

In Alex’s poem, the narrator is stuck in traffic ‘at the end of the frozen room’. His poem evokes the monotony of urban working life and missed opportunities, and suggests breaking out. I love his poem, but I found myself wondering what happened next, and how that escape might pan out. I also wanted to kick a little against the romanticism of the ending. My starting point for the poem was: What would you find if you followed Alex Dimitrov’s call to ‘open the car door and go’?

The answer turned out to be a surreal anti-pastoral.

If you’ve ever been lost in the countryside with darkness approaching, perhaps you’ll recognise this feeling of unease.

The imagery is of wide, open spaces, a landscape that is threatening as opposed to comforting and enriching. The horizon is not clear and the map is useless. The narrator is wading – at a physical disadvantage from the very first line – towards a forgotten destination. Even the air is ‘relentless’, and the colour of the sky is ‘gunmetal’. This is a world without GPS, and I wanted to give it a dreamlike quality, with the owl out hunting during the day, encroaching grass and the rest of the birds disappearing. What happens next? You’ll have to write it!

The form was, for once, easy: it matches the poem which inspired it, but also had to be without stanza breaks as it needed to embody surroundings without edges.

I worked hard on the sounds in the poem, filling it with soft, unvoiced consonants, long vowels and ‘w’ sounds to build the airy feeling and make the poem feel almost whispered, as if the poem were at risk of getting lost on the way, just like the narrator.

This poem was a late addition to my collection, Zoetrope, and the last poem I wrote, although it doesn’t come at the end of the book. It embodies Zoetrope’s themes of journeys which seem to go in circles and the difficulty of making progress. It acts as a metaphor for just how lost we sometimes are. It also investigates our alienation with nature and at its heart, it’s an ecopoem. In the collection it sits after a poem about the arrival of AI and is followed by two more poems about feeling exposed in a natural setting. It’s not until the end of the collection and ‘Blackbird, remixed’ that a connection with nature seems to be restored, and we remember something of our reason for being here, finding the way at last.

Next week read my review of Zoetrope by Hilary Otto.