David Kernohan
Do you have a favourite space to compose your poetry?
At the moment, I have two favourite places where I like to write poetry. The first is sitting in my lounge room, looking out the window. From my front window I look out on my small rose garden and the sky line of the city of Perth. I watch the cycle of the rose bushes coming into bud and flowering, the wind blowing the leaves of the trees next door, the skyline of the city and the sky; its blueness or the clouds as they form and move across the expanse. Of course, it means I often just sit, rather than write, yet just sitting allows time for words, thoughts, associations to crystallise.
The other place I like writing is at a café, my favourite one at the moment is Mary St Bakery in Mt Lawley. There is different energy at the café, it is the exact opposite to my lounge room, noisy and loud, yet the loudness becomes a cocoon that surrounds me and allows me to write.
Ideas for poems and fragments of lines often come to me when I walk to work. I walk to and from my work which is a distance of about 6km’s each way. Sometimes, depending on what is going on in my life, this is long enough for the mind to settle and ideas for poems to surface or phrases will come to mind that give me a seed thought that can be developed later when I sit to write.