Micheal O’Siadhail on the Pleasure of Writing Poems by Hand

As a poet I belong to the pencil, sharpener and eraser generation. I always trust a pencil. Ink is too indelible and it inhibits me. There is comfort in knowing that my first stab can be erased. Only in pencil do I dare the blank page.

I like the feel of writing, the movement of my hand and wrist, the touch of the lead on the paper. There is something direct and solid about the shaping letters. I like a soft black lead mixed with a little clay, a 2B. When I discovered that the playwright Brian Friel also had a 2B fetish, it became part of a shared language. How is it going? Are you pushing the 2B? we asked each other.

I  grew up and went to school in Ireland where unlike Americans, we didn’t learn how to type. I tried to hunt and peck but found using a typewriter impossible. Yes, I could tap out the words slowly and painfully but what if I made a mistake? I would have to wind out the sheet of paper, white out the error and reload.

Then the real trouble began. Try as I might the retyped letter landed above or below the original word. I gave up.

My beloved wife rescued me. When the time came to type up a collection for the publishers, she stepped into the breach. She had taken a course and had the tenacity which I lacked. I read once how Tolstoy’s wife Sophia had hand-copied the whole of War and Peace while pregnant. Such labors of love.

Then it happened. I was visiting a friend who had an early personal computer. He was printing out something. He pressed a button and there was a typed document grinding its way out of a what looked like the carriage of a typewriter. Unbelievable. He show me the screen and how you could type and correct any mistype at the touch of a delete key. I had seen the golf-ball typewriters but here was sheer magic.

I immediately ordered a computer. Soon after I had begun to get the hand of a program called WordStar I was introduced to the marvel of emails and the internet.

But I couldn’t help wondering about the extraordinary illogical ordering of the letters on the keyboard. This qwerty system was invented to solve the problem of the quickly tapped keys tangling by slowing us down. But why the need now to torture us poor hunt and peckers?

Then there was the fear, the dread that everything you’d striven to type might vanish. What would happen if you pressed the wrong key? Unlike later generations who have grown up with computers, even to this day my nervousness persists. I’m not sure I have tamed the beast. You should just play with it, young people advise. But I don’t want to play.  I just want it to serve my purposes.

For all the ease compared with a typewriter I stuck to my pencil when writing my poems. Partially because I think with a pencil and through the physical act of writing. I don’t believe I could think and tap at the same time.

But there is more. My manuscripts are a mess. Each attempt at a line or stanza remains on the page. I may cross it out or indicate with an arrow that I want to use it earlier in the poem. So the page become a maze of arrows, markings, underlinings. If I want to revert to a previously rejected line, it’s there.

What if I were to try to do this on my computer screen? Yes, I can cut and paste. But how could I retrieve something I deleted a half an hour ago? Maybe a computer genius could somehow have multiple screens, but I’m happy with my pencil.

What, then, is the role of the computer in my work? When I think it’s ready I’ll type up a poem and look at it on the screen. That is indeed a moment that I enjoy.

For me it’s not quite the thrill of seeing a poem in print. I know much poetry is now published online but for me it is a stage on the way to print. For the first time you see the visual effect, the shape of the poem and where there are stanza you see the whole contour of the poem. Sometimes I’ll even make some changes here.

Of course, there is a convenience to the internet. I used to bicycle to my local library to quickly look up any information I needed. But I can’t help suspecting that I’m losing out on the serendipity and leisure of browsing. I once went looking for a biography of Milton and left with a biography of Arthur Miller.

All in all, while no luddite, I go on with my pencil, sharpener  and eraser although I confess that I spoil myself with a sharpen which has a small box attached for collecting parings and with a really good quality eraser. I push my 2B.

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Desire by Micheal O’Siadhail is available via Baylor University Press.