First Draft to Last Draft (2)

Giving Birth with Anne Sexton by Kim Moore

Since writing my post about the first draft of my poem “In That Year” I have become slightly obsessed with thinking about the drafting process. I think this new obsession with looking back is both a distraction from getting on with my next collection - of course it is! But perhaps it is a distraction that is also an important part of the process.

I have been looking back at my old notebooks to find drafts of poems. Often I don’t recognise the me that saw something worth chasing in the first drafts. Was my past self just more persistent? More wise? More instinctual? And how many things that could have been poems have I ignored?

Today I want to talk about a poem that is from my forthcoming, as yet nameless third collection. The poem is called “Giving Birth with Anne Sexton”, and was published in The Poetry Review in Vol 112 No 1, Spring 2022, under the editorship of Emily Berry. When it was published in the magazine, it was under the slightly shorter title of “Giving Birth with Anne”.

It is in perhaps one of the most beautiful notebooks I own. The notebook is handmade, and I bought it after a days hike in Turkey on holiday with my husband. We got to the top of a mountain, and in the village there was a man making handmade leather bound notebooks. We hiked back down the mountain and went out for dinner that night, and then I got food poisoning and became severely dehydrated, and spent three days in a Turkish hospital. Coincidentally, my room in the hospital was bigger than our hotel room (thanks husband for being the sort of person who gets good travel insurance for both of us). Then we had one day of holiday left before coming back to the UK. Anyway, this notebook has all of that inside it, as well as the poems.