When you have been writing poetry for forty years there is no exclusive routine that you follow. Day by day it is more a sense of general alertness, so that when something explodes, however mildly, in your head, you take the time to reach for a notebook and scribble down whatever line or image has struck you, or even a subject. You have written so many poems before that you recognise whatever impulse it is.
Here in Donegal, in the happy twilight of my years, the family routine is part of the writing routine. My eleven-year-old son wakes me up in time to drive him to school, a journey on which I am always attentive, because he is at the heart of my life. Then I go home to make breakfast for my wife, who is also at the heart of my creative surges, when she has time from the computer. I use it as a word processor, which is the typewriter we might have dreamed of in my youth, allowing for infinite and easy corrections to the first draft.
So there we have it: the family and the landscape and the books, and the people around us, and me with my notebook, feeding off them, using the hard-learned skills to make art out of what happens, or dreams, or memories, or reacting to the work of other poets. But the routine is domestic. I do my duties as they come up and the writing fits into the spaces between; but the spaces are ample. My wife and I have done a unique thing - started a university course that we can teach from home. Lancaster University trusted us to make a go of this, as none of the Irish universities did, and now it is one of the most respected courses of Creative Writing M.A.s in the world. Apart from the beauty of Donegal, we both enjoy teaching, so the workshops are like dreams you might have of established painters' coaching apprentices. We discuss their poems, and the excitement of working on their work prompts me to write more poems of my own.
To keep up with the students I keep up with works I haven't read, like Dante's poetry, and that opens up possibilities for me. To help us with the students we hire good local and profound poets like Thomas McCarthy and Paul Durcan and Cathal O'Searcaigh, and their different talents are a challenge. So it goes. Sometimes you wake at night with a poem wriggling to come out. Sometimes in the afternoon. And we try to keep good people round us, so now we have Dr Anne Colman editing my memoirs that I have been fiddling about with for twenty years - the end is in sight! My wife, Janice, shows me a version in English of one of Cathal O'Searcaigh's poems, and this is another push towards creativity.
James Simmons's new collection of poetry, The Company of Children, was launched at The Poet's House in Co Donegal on July 10. It is published by Salmon Poetry.