Everyone in that room is one the same page
                                                                                                                            and everyone knows what I stand for.
                                                                                                                            I'm not saying I understand how it feels.
                                                                                                                            I'm just trying to say, 'I see you. - Harry Styles

Harry,
I'm not saying I understand how it feels. 
I'm just trying to say, 'I see you'.

Gold Light Shining began with Fresher's Flu. I was in bed, doubling up on Vitamin C tablets and sneezing every five minutes or so. I had reading to do for class, since there was always reading to do for class, but I ignored it and instead let the algorithm of YouTube take over. As a teenager, I had never seen One Direction on X Factor, nor had I listened to their music, or been to any concerts. I pretty much exclusively listened to The Civil Wars the year they were formed and never thought that I had been missing out on anything in particular.

About an hour in, and after watching car-crash X Factor auditions, the algorithm decided to show me what seemed to be a playlist of One Direction's entire X Factor journey interspersed with their 'hiatus' interviews. It was fascinated to watch them fresh-faced and entirely out of their depth juxtaposed with the exhausted but confident men they were just five years later. I wasn't really paying attention, happy to let the videos play as I dragged another blanket over to the bed and curled up under it. This was until I started paying attention to Harry Styles, the youngest and most conventionally charismatic of them all. At this point I'd watched so many videos I could at least identify each of them by name. There was something about the way Harry spoke that intrigued me and he wasn't saying anything profound, I think it was something like "It's winter, I'm tired." but instantly I wanted to write.

I picked up a notebook and casually wrote down transcripts of his answers in interviews, or his speeches on stage. I wasn't looking for outrageous stories but I found quickly that Harry had a very particular way of talking, rich in vocabulary and detail, and soon enough I had about two pages of text to work with which included things like vanilla milkshakes, elbow patches, roller-skates and trumpets. Over the following weekend, I wrote my first Harry Styles poem, the enigmatically titled, "Harry". "Harry" didn't make it into Gold Light Shining (and for good reasons) but it was the spark of something fun, and something niche that spiraled out of control and landed me with my debut publishing contract, contacts around the world, and some incredible opportunities. 

There were very few people who, when I told them I was working on a collection of poems inspired by Harry Styles, haven't at least looked amused. Most have had a bit of a giggle and some have laughed outright (although I don't think this was in a mean way but more in a delighted or desperate exasperation). After all, it is quite specific and although I was introduced to him as an artist mostly through his debut album, Harry Styles by Harry Styles, there are many many more people who know him as a teenage heart-throb, and now as a twentysomething heart-throb. It is only through research (that extends beyond having his albums on repeat for months, which I have also justified as research) that I began to form connections to other literary works from Harry's work and I really found the literary merit of creating a treasure hunt of his work through my own. He reads Rumi, he refers to Charles Bukowski in the lyrics of Woman with 'you flower, you feast’, references Shakespeare, and Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. 

     "Nobody knew I would spend the next year
     writing about flares with flora and fauna print.”
     - Never Going Back Now

Of my poems in Gold Light Shining, I think quite often of 'Sweet Creature'. It came relatively early in the writing process but unlike the immature "Harry" it survived years of editing and  evolved with me as I learnt to write better poems. Sharing the title with a song on the debut album, "sweet creature" also appears in Act 3 Scene 3 of Othello. As I was enjoying manipulating the different limitations of voice, I decided I would write this poem only using words that appeared in this scene. (Luckily it is a long scene.) I was most intrigued by this form due to intense hysteria that seemed to surround Harry. His words were constantly twisted by the media and he was so dependent on how others perceived him. I wanted to make the source text unrecognizable, in the style of tabloid rumours, so I refused to use full lines like a cento, preferring to pull and push apart my own lines in a collage technique that I've fallen in love with and one that I find rewarding to write in. 

I linger on "Sweet Creature" for another reason. I remember it being the second poem I'd taken to Ciaran Carson's Friday workshop, back when I was a bundle of nerves and still wanting to prove myself to the other writers in the room. A few weeks before, I'd bought in a poem about a boy who yawned like a dinosaur (so maybe the lecturer who told me I was obsessed with boys was right) but with my printouts of 'Sweet Creature' I hoped I had created something complex and lyrical, and I was keen to guard my secret that really this was a Harry Styles poem. Ciaran sensed something musical in the poem and ended up singing it all the way through. I was entirely embarrassed, but knew I'd never have somebody, let alone Ciaran, a man who absolutely adored music and language, sing my poem again thus completing its journey from literature to music back to literature again. I think even Harry would've enjoyed that.   

After a few months more of writing, I realised that the Harry Styles poems I most enjoyed writing were the ones that weren't obviously Harry Styles poems, so I stopped writing poems that shared song titles and instead started writing poems with six degrees of separation to Harry and sometimes poems with six degrees of separation to myself. "Cinnamon Honey Butter" is one of these. In my second year of living in Belfast, I was lucky enough to be selected to take part in a week-long cultural exchange with the University of Petra in Jordan. It was an incredibly humbling experience full of generosity and the most beautiful historical sites. It was also my first time in the Middle East and I'd felt overwhelmed at dinner hearing about how challenging it was for the students to secure tourist visas when all we had done was pay forty Jordanian dollars on arrival. I felt guilty that I was given a funded place on the trip, somewhat based on the strength of my history of artistic practice which at that point mostly consisted of poems about pop-stars, when there were  other people far more intelligent and worthy of travel opportunities than I was.

However, on our penultimate day we were given a tour of the university campus by students who were showing us around between exams. I was wearing a long orange skirt and a Harry Styles t-shirt, the first I had ever bought. One of our cultural partners stopped me and pointed to my t-shirt asking if it was Harry. I was so excited that she recognised him that we talked about my hope to write a book of poems inspired by him as we walked towards the Music block. Even in this place that I'd never been, someone was encouraging me to continue. It felt like a sign from the universe to keep writing. So I did. And I didn’t really stop finding tangents across the cultural landscape. I secured a travel scholarship to visit The Met's CAMP: Notes on Fashion exhibition, the year he hosted the Met Gala, where another exhibition-goer stopped me to ask about my Kiwi painted denim jacket and I wrote 'The Spring I Decided I Needed a Sugar Daddy'. I learnt how to apply for funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland so I could write more poems about music and audio description. I worked with Robin Price on a Digital Arts installation that combined British Sign Language with a poem about Harry, anonymous in Japan, and I subscribed to a newsletter from Ally Gross in which I learnt much about fandom.

Through all of that, I finally understood the thing about Harry that I was most interested in: I don't know him. Everything I've written about Harry is fulfilling a persona that I've constructed for him. I'm not best friends with Harry. I've read extensively about him, I've watched him perform and be interviewed, listened to his music, read the same books as him, probably watched the same films as him but in these poems I'm not pretending to  know a man I've never met. This is one reason why Harry is never referred to as Harry in any of the poems. He's sometimes "the boy with the Gucci guitar strings", sometimes the "showman", and once a "sexy pirate prince" celebrating his Harris Reed look in Amsterdam 2018. So Harry, and the poems of Gold Light Shining, get to retain the mystery of it all a little longer, and I get to continue to have fun with it because, as he told Zane Lowe earlier this year, "if you are happy doing what you are doing, then nobody can tell you you're not successful", and I'm happy, writing poems about the version of Harry that I believe to be true. 

Gold Light Shining is released by Banshee Press on October 22nd. It is available to pre-order now from: https://www.bansheelit.com/shop/goldlightshining