A poem a day for 21 days

My name is Madeleine Snook and I was born and raised in Gosford, NSW, Australia (a two-hour train-ride north of Sydney I usually say to try and give it a bit of context for anyone outside of the Central Coast). I have since lived in France, Canada, Scotland, South Korea, and England, doing most of my travelling solo since the age of 17.

I started out my university student life at the University of British Columbia in Canada with a science degree. However, when I realised that the science I excelled at in high school in Australia was nothing like the science (and dastardly maths) I had to do in university in Canada, I seriously started to doubt my path in life. It was then that a particularly passionate professor in my optional Anthropology of Linguistics class caught my eye and showed me that my heart truly lay in the arts, words, and languages all along. I had studied French and J.R.R. Tolkien’s constructed language Quenya as a hobby in my free time, and it was only now that I realised that I should do what I loved doing anyway as my career.

My family and I moved back to Australia with our Canadian Newfoundland dog Nana, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics at the University in Sydney, felt my path align again, and never looked back. One 20,000-word thesis and a five-week field research trip to the Isle of Skye later and I graduated with Honours in Linguistics and Celtic Studies. My dream of becoming a linguist, author, and professor was slowly starting to solidify.

Then in 2022, I graduated from the University of Cambridge (Lucy Cavendish College) after an extremely intensive 9 months and 30,000-word thesis with a Master’s in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. What drew me to Lucy Cavendish College initially was the fact that my supervisor, Dr. Henriette Hendriks, was the Vice-President and the College displayed a progressive stance in equal opportunities for students from a variety of backgrounds. Indeed, one of the best parts about being a member of Lucy Cavendish College were the lovely librarians and the sheer diversity of people I had the opportunity to meet at group activities and formal dinners, who I really would not have had the opportunity to have a deep discussion with otherwise.

I think what initially inspired my writing after my graduation from Lucy Cavendish was my competitiveness and my love of setting myself a good old challenge. I particularly like to do this with New Year’s resolutions. I had done the usual ‘drink more water’, ‘do yoga everyday’ type resolutions with some success, and at the turn of the new decade in 2020, I decided to set myself an extra challenging one: to do a piece of artwork in one sitting, every day, for 365 days. In the end, I would have noticeably improved my drawing and painting skills and have a gallery of every day of my year to then exhibit, possibly. That January, I had accepted a job offer to teach English at a Hagwon in South Korea, and by February, I had moved to Incheon, diligently doing my daily sketch on the paper vomit bag provided by the plane on the flight there.

However, what started out as a daily exercise to improve artistic skill quickly evolved into a necessary therapy as the year 2020 descended into the madness of the COVID-19 pandemic. My school shut down for three months, the other foreign teachers and I were put into debt-bondage by the boss, and we were trapped both by travel policies and our contracts at an abusive workplace. I would push myself to pump out an artwork a day, either drawing or painting, even if I had to scratch out a sketch lying exhausted in my bed at a minute to midnight. Once done, I would blu-tack them to my wall in a chronological fashion that grew to cover nearly my entire wall space. They became both a litmus test for my psychological state that day and a window out of my bleak shoebox of a studio apartment. The same process has happened with my poems. I was stuck in a minimum-wage retail job straight after I had graduated, and my living circumstances were uncomfortable and invasive. This time, I had no art materials at my disposal nor any private space of my own to work on them in peace, but what I did have was a phone and a notepad at my work. As a second year of spending New Year’s Eve in a foreign country completely alone loomed, I came to accept the situation and presented myself with another daily New Year’s resolution for studious self-improvement: to write a poem a day for 365 days. I would write whatever I felt like writing about that day, and I had to expel an emotion each day without fail.

It was ten days into January when something like fate appeared on my Facebook feed. Bookleaf Publishing were holding a challenge soon: to write a poem a day for 21 days until the end of January. I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’ve been doing a poem a day so far, I might as well enter it!’ And there began the publishing process. I just continued to do what I was doing anyway - writing down thoughts as they popped up on scraps of paper I found at my job and sneakily stashing them next to the till until I could write them down on my notes app when I got access to my phone again at lunchtime and again on the bus home. The bus, as you could probably tell from the title ‘Poems from a Stagecoach’, played a huge role in my poetry.

To save time, paper, and money, the Stagecoach Bus company provides an app where the regular commuter may conveniently buy a month’s worth of virtual tickets at a discounted price to be activated every day at the approach of the bus. This ticket, as you might already know, consists of a QR code, the time, and a unique, randomly generated word for the day. I was always intrigued by which words were to be bestowed on me by the fickle gods of public transport each day, and so I came to bestow a use on them in turn. Rather than let the words go to waste and disappear off my screen each day, I decided I would give an extra challenge to myself and base my poems on the word somehow. Sometimes they would inspire a whole theme or just a single line where I would insert it. Each word I used then became the title for that poem.

Some titles describe the poem well, and some are deceptive. As I wrote these in the depths of a gloomy, depressive English January, many of the poems are a form of catharsis for my seasonal depression and ongoing frustrations. Therefore, many of the themes are quite serious and dark: my rage against the ignorance and delay in serious climate change action at the various level of society; the brutality and violence inherent in the consumption of animals at all stages; the misogynistic aggressions I have received from men (and also women); loneliness and touch-deprivation; the pollution of our environment and bodies with microplastics; death…

Albeit, while the majority of the poems can be considered grim, there is also light, love and adoration for sentient beings (as well as sentimental shoes), like octopuses, dogs, and butterflies, wonderment in the changes of the seasons, and the common complaint against pimples and a chronically late bus. I believe that my previous study of Linguistics at Cambridge University allowed me to make the venture from visual arts into poetry a more comfortable one. It was foundational for my understanding of meter, stress, assonance, and alliteration, and allowed me to make etymological wordplay and experiment with both formal styles like Horatian odes, sonnets, and haikus, and more relaxed styles verging on prose.

I believe that even though my readers may not be vegan, feminist, female, or fighting against climate change, there is still something here any human can relate to amongst these 21 poems. If just one person can find solace in my words, then my job as a poet is done.

My recently published work ‘Poems from a Stagecoach’ can be found anywhere books are sold with the ISBN: 9789357440899