THE weather is just about getting warm enough for me to make use of my little writing hut: a wooden shed at the bottom of our garden, which bears a ceramic plaque that my mother had made for me, saying “The Temple of Peace”, and illustrated with an open manuscript book, a quill and ink, and an olive leaf.

The hut itself has a writing table, a chair, some bookshelves made of old wine cases, and, of course, a pipe-rack and ashtray. Its real advantage, though, its most congenial feature, is not a presence but an absence. It has no electricity, and is just beyond the reach of the household WiFi. Perfect. Pinned up in one corner is a now fading and curling copy of Wendell Berry’s poem “How to be a Poet (to remind myself)”, with its simple opening lines; simple, but so hard to put into practice: “Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet.”

Well, I can try. Just the walk from the house to the hut is a kind of shedding, a letting go of all the noisy concerns and anxieties of contemporary life which buzz around one’s head like flies. Once in the hut, I find that I am already following some of the other advice that Berry offers in that poem:

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly.

And, of course, the absolute prerequisite, so hard to achieve for any modern writer:

. . . Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.

So, I sit down and am quiet, either in the hut itself, or on a chair just outside, where I can wait for the roses to open in the bed that Maggie planted, roses chosen as much for their names as for their beauty: “Ancient Mariner”, “Poet’s Wife”, “Rambling Rector” (that last one is not in the rose-bed, but clambering and rambling over another shed.)

And then, at some point, from somewhere in the silence, the words come. They arrive in twos or threes at first, holding hands, drawing one another in. They make their passage from the mind through the pen to the paper, the shapes and forms of things unknown.

I listen for what they have to say, lean forward, intrigued, and begin the great adventure of discovering what I am going to write next. If it is something new or unexpected, an image that seems to come from nowhere, teasing me with some hint of a meaning that is just beyond my grasp, then I know that I might have a poem on my hands. If it is only what I already know, if it is no more and no less than the idea I had, when I was walking down to the hut, of what the next poem would be about, then it is almost certainly not a poem: it is just a note to self.

The poem, if it is a real poem, has to quicken in my hands with its own life even as I am writing it; it has to push back a little, even break free, and ask me to follow it somewhere — somewhere that I had not considered or visited. Once we are there, the poem can start to do what poetry does best: to tell me things that the poem knows and I do not.