One Size Smaller

Colin Ainsley has published nine collections since 1974 and has never owned a computer, and if you write about him you will be told both of these facts in the first five minutes. Not by him.

We met at the café by the harbour in Whitstable at half past eight, because he had already been working for two hours.

“You get up at five,” I said. “That's a discipline.”

“It's a habit,” he said.

I noticed it then, and after that I couldn't stop noticing it. Every word I offered him came back one size smaller. His work wasn't a body of work; it was the poems. His routine was what he did in the morning. When I used the word ‘craft', he looked into his tea for slightly too long and said, “Writing.”

People say his poems sound spoken rather than written. They do. He reads them the way he orders tea.

I asked why he still uses a pen. I had a whole paragraph ready in my head about ink, paper and unhurried pleasure.

“I'm slow with my hands,” he said. “So I only write down the ones I still want by the end of the line.”

Naturally, I asked whether that was a kind of editing.

“It's crossing things out.”

It has taken me two weeks to write this, mostly because every sentence sounded, when I read it back, like something he would have made shorter. I've cut the word ‘lyrical' four times. My editor wanted the headline to be ‘A Life in Verse'.

I sent Colin the piece before it went to print, which I don't normally do. He replied on a postcard, one line long.

“Nice, Zainab. Long, though.”