I sat down and I just started writing. I wrote consistently for about half an hour, maybe longer, from the beginning of the poem to the end. I’ve barely edited any of it; it just arrived. And that doesn’t happen to me very often.

At the time, I was going through a lot. I was building up to what became quite a sustained manic period – I’m a manic depressive. I could feel myself moving into it – I got up one morning feeling absolutely wired and I was like that for the entire day that I wrote this. At the time, I had a friend living with me who was trying to come off Valium, and he’s a writer too, so all day we were passing each other on the stairs. We were both really inspired by each other’s energy but both going through some intense suffering too.

When I was younger, I think the writer that most inspired me was Elizabeth Smart, with ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept’. I remember reading it at the age of about nineteen, thinking to myself, ‘I need to write something that’s consistently ecstatic.’ I’ve always wanted to do that. She starts and ends that book at the same pitch. All the way through, it’s wild and it doesn’t go any quieter.

So this is a poem I feel very passionate about, and very excited about, because when I finished I knew I’d done something I wanted to do for years and years.

Well, I did make some changes, but not many. I think you know it’s finished when you can’t bear to go near it ever again. If I gave this poem to a good editor, they’d probably go to town on it. This may not be its final form, should it ever appear in a book. But with this poem, I think it was my job to just express what I needed to express and put the words in the right order. I feel like it’s alive, somehow. For now, I’m happy with it.

I think that poetry should get its hands dirty more often. There’s a lot of emphasis on things being perfect and channelled and I don’t always want to do that.

Well of course, it’s an art form too. And a performance. It isn’t just me voicing my experience like a journalist or an autobiography. I’m shaping something so that it’s powerful and makes sense. I want the poem to make sense. I want people to come away from reading it having had an experience that makes sense.

Yes. It takes a lot of practice to be able to sit for half an hour and write non-stop. I also feel a natural sense of rhythm and rhyme, a love of music, and I practise writing.

I was brought up in a house full of music, with very limited access to poetry, so my writing does come a lot from that tradition. So I grew up listening to grunge, and with bands like Nirvana you have lyrics that tackle some of the difficult issues I’m interested in.

But I’m not writing songs either. I need the level of complexity and depth that poetry requires, and those thoughts do have to be structured. It’s got to be defined and disciplined. I write every day and I’m very hard on myself and on my own writing. I motivate myself by tearing my work apart and telling myself I have to do better. That’s why this poem’s slightly unusual – normally I will really struggle over a long period of time.

I’ve never written a poem of this length, and I’ve never written a poem like this which flowers and blooms out of a single line of thought.

That line is me as the writer going, ‘Oh shit, what have I just written,’ but thinking no, I’ve got to keep going. It was finding a hook back to reality, telling myself I was still here, but to keep going.

Yes, it’s incredibly difficult when you’re writing a poem, especially one of this length. I do that with a lot of poems – just bring myself back to reality, which also keeps things together.

At the beginning of the poem, I talk about hallucinations. I’m making a statement that the poem isn’t ‘real’, it is a fantasy. But I suffer hallucinations so I have a sense of unreality in my life – I feel very dissociative when I’m stressed and I fall away into psychosis. I’m a high-functioning manic depressive. My poetry and my writing gives me a freedom and a context and a physical outlet for that pain.

It’s an apt metaphor for my mind. In my early twenties I had a period of deep psychotic depression where I had no idea what was real and what wasn’t. I tried to kill myself, and came round after a coma in a psychiatric ward. I thought I was in hell. I didn’t believe that I was alive. I can’t even begin to explain how that feels – that your own mind can do that to you. I’m always conscious now that I need to have touchstones to keep me sane, safe and in control. The whole act of my writing is about claiming control. It’s a place where I’ve imposed my own parameters and it’s important to me that I can do that.

Writing poetry for me is a vocation. Without it, I wouldn’t cope, wouldn’t survive. Everything I feel, experience, desire – everything is in my poems. It can exist in a safe zone.

I believe, after writing consistently for ten years, and after working hard at the craft, that I have the authority to exert that control. I feel I do know what I’m doing now – I didn’t a few years ago.

The particular day that this was written, I had an email from a friend, and he signed off telling me that I was very precious. I found it a very strange and disconcerting thing – nobody had ever said that to me in my entire life. I felt like a child, and that he was making me childlike.

The poem was a reaction against being called ‘precious’. To me, the poem is about men and women and the tensions between them and men being dominant. I felt that when my friend called me ‘precious’, he had gone beyond the boundaries of what I felt was acceptable. We’re still friends though!

My initial reaction was: Yes, actually, I am precious, but I’m not going to let somebody patronise me, so I’ll make it the title of a poem so that it becomes my statement.

Constantly, throughout my career, I’ve always followed my instincts – I could’ve acknowledged to myself as I was writing this poem that a lot of the things I’ve included are not pleasant to read, or I could have worried about giving too much of myself away. But I didn’t do that. I felt it was right and I do believe that there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to say the things I’ve written in there.

I am aware that there is something masochistic in writing these things about myself. It’s masochistic but it’s safe – I’ve created this space where it’s okay to talk about these things. In real life, these things are hard to put into words, but when I do it in poetry I build and create a safe haven for it to exist.

I know from experience of having been published and from giving readings that a lot of women do respond to my poetry because they recognise their own experiences. Women go through things that are often not okay to talk about in society. I know a lot of women who have suffered horrifically in their lives. It sometimes feels like women are supposed to have pain, suffer it and then not talk about it. Or if we do talk about it, we’re supposed to make light of it and say it’s all okay. But the experience of women should be talked about more, and that’s central to my writing. Women have awful sexual experiences. I could talk to any of my female friends and I can guarantee there’s not one of them who wouldn’t say, ‘Yes, this happened with a man, I didn’t like it but I didn’t say anything.’

I have the benefit of never having been told what to do as a poet. Or what not to do. I’ve never been in academic situations where I’ve been asked to tone things down. I realise that there are lot of people who wouldn’t be interested in my work, or would even be opposed to it. But I want to feel I’m creating an environment, even if it’s within literature, where I’ve liberated people. I know I’ve liberated myself.

Recently I got The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin’s book, and the pictures in there inform what I’m talking about in this poem. There are massive, irreconcilable tensions between men and women in relationships. But that’s also part of why relationships between men and women work, too. I’ve had relationships with women and they work in a very different way. As much as I’ve enjoyed those relationships, I’ve always erred towards being dominated by men, which disturbs me. Relationships with men have been a massive issue in my life – I’ve had therapy about it and it didn’t work. What works is writing poetry.

It’s a number of things. We talked about influences earlier. Another poet I used to read when I was younger was Rumi. When he writes ‘you’ and ‘my beloved’, he’s often talking about God, but I always preferred to imagine that it was my poem and that I was saying it to another person. One of my biggest passions is love songs – so this ‘you’ can be elusive in the poem and in general, but it can also apply to specific people. I’m a romantic person. I’m married and I have serious, affectionate friendships.

When the ‘you’ is personal, it is addressed to a specific friend. It’s about how I was close to him but the boundaries of our friendship had been blurred and I needed to exorcise how I felt. I’d had intense feelings towards him and the only thing I could do to make that real was to put it into the context of this poem.

I’m referring to a specific person but at times I’m also referring to all the men who have been in my life. There’s a sort of quiet rage at times too – I’m also referring to people who have seriously hurt, tormented and abused me.

Women who have been sexually abused and assaulted can still enjoy sex. That’s a really important idea that I wanted to discuss publicly. It’s another thing that just doesn’t get talked about. When I’m manic, I need constant stimulation – it’s the same as a narcotic. When you’re manic, you realise that if you don’t keep it going, you’ll go downhill fast. So often I feel very sexual when I’m like that. But I’ve also suffered sexual abuse in my life, so that comes with a sense of guilt too. It needs to be brought out, but it’s difficult. It needs to be done in a controlled way.

I went to see James Rhodes, the concert pianist. He uses his fame to talk about abuse. I was impressed that he stood up on the stage and was very open about the abuse he suffered as a child. And I thought, if he’s going to do that, I’ll do it too.

I was first manipulated when I was six years old. That affects you for the rest of your life. When you’ve suffered a trauma like that at that age, the child that you were stays with you, in a sense. I draw back into myself regularly – I become childlike, petulant, I sulk all the time. That’s me going back into myself and being safe – even the title, ‘I am very precious’, suggests don’t hurt me. I honestly believe that the man who manipulated me thought it was an acceptable way to behave, and feels no remorse, because when you look at people like Saville and Rolf Harris, and the way they’ve dealt with it, there’s no remorse there.

We’re all shaped by our early experiences, and the same can be said about our early sexual experiences. We go through life and we’re told to just leave everything behind – time passes, we move forward. But it doesn’t work like that. We’re shaped by everything that goes on, and we don’t all go ‘forward’. Sometimes we get stuck.

I will never move on from what happened to me. This particular man would tell me how beautiful I was. That’s hard because now, if any man ever says something similar to me or compliments me in that way, I don’t react well to it.

But also, I want to be able to say it about myself: I look all right today. And I want to be able to accept it when other people say it to me, but it is hard.

Again, this is not just me. This happens to people. It upsets me that it’s not just me. You only have to look at what’s been going on the media over the last year. At some points last year you couldn’t turn the news on without seeing it. And every time I put the TV on I was in tears. And I thought about all those women throughout all those years feeling the same way as me.

Maybe a few years ago there might have been more opposition to me writing about things like this. I do think things are changing – the amount of women coming forward was heartening. It’s important and I do want it to stay in the public eye. That’s why I chose this poem for this medium – the fact that it’s on the internet rather than a paper magazine, and the fact that I had the opportunity to talk about it and explain it – it feels like that’s a political statement too. I don’t believe you can separate the personal and the political.

Pornography is a big part of this poem. I’ve got a teenage daughter, she’s fifteen, and she’ll say to me, ‘This boy wants to get nude pictures of my friend,’ and when I question her she’ll say, ‘Oh, they all do it.’ The other day I was talking to a friend of mine whose teenage daughter’s friends are going to parties and having anal sex so they don’t get pregnant. I am concerned about young men trying to do what they see in porn films. I worry that what’s lost is the sense that your partner in a romantic relationship has complex emotional needs. So if one person in a partnership just wants sexual gratification, that can cause suffering. Especially with women who have been abused – the sense of shame and guilt is with you from that.

I remember when I was fifteen, when the internet was very new. I didn’t even have a PC, but my boyfriend at the time did. I remember going to his house and he showed me these images – I was quite innocent, but I remember being shocked by it, and it was things I’d never even thought of before. I can almost remember the exact content even now. I remember realising that boys must be seeing this, taking on board what was going on and applying it to their lives. But nobody talks about it openly.

It’s things like sado-masochism becoming part of the mainstream. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with individual people doing what they want to do, but on a wider level, this feels like an unspoken acceptance as a society that it’s okay to link sex to violence. Now it’s a part of what sex is and nobody actually discusses it in any real depth. I find that confusing and disturbing. Obviously, it’s not just men who look at porn. And I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with anyone doing what they want to do. At all. But I do feel that sincerity is important.

It isn’t real. It’s about fantasy. When you see images of pornography, you don’t see human beings, you see acts of gratification. One of my male friends said to me that he wonders what it does to the heart. I feel for women in films who are being exploited. For a man to watch the exploitation of a woman, and be able to switch that knowledge off in his mind – I think that is a damaging thing and I find it immensely troubling. That we all have that ability to switch off emotionally.

When I was 16 I miscarried my daughter’s twin. At the time, it was very traumatic. I completely blanked it out, like nothing had happened, and I couldn’t cope with it. The first time I’ve ever mentioned it is in this poem.

It does have relevance to my life but I’ve never accepted it or thought about it. It’s an absence that I feel now and I never used to. That’s a consequence of sex that women have to put up with. We have to think about our bodies all the time, protect ourselves from consequences in a way that men don’t.

At this stage, I hate the idea of pregnancy. I never want to do it again. That might not be ‘normal’ but it might be a late reaction to things that have happened that I’ll probably never be able to reconcile. At the time I convinced myself it didn’t matter, but now I’m angry that I was forced into that position. I was on my own in a flat – I lived downstairs and the man upstairs just watched porn all day. I could hear it constantly, very loud – I found it disturbing. At the time I felt that there was nothing I could do about it; I just accepted it as part of the background noise of my life. It goes back to control – my poetry is my way of trying to regain control. It’s an expression of profound trauma and not just personally but with things other people have suffered.

I’ve been brought up to react to things by not making a fuss. My family won’t read this poem. Or if they did, they’d be opposed to it. I was brought up being told not to write, not to express myself. I was told, ‘Melissa, will you stop telling people how you feel? You’re not doing yourself any good.’ I’m violently opposed to that attitude! I’ve never accepted it. It’s belligerence or something. That’s how I’ve survived – by asserting that I’m allowed to exercise my will and say what I want.

[Laughing] Yeah, maybe it’s a Northern thing. People have this concept of me of being a deadly serious and morose woman. My friends joke that as a poet I should be wearing black and wandering around the moors. Someone once told me I’d make a good widow. But I’m not like that as a person!

Everything I write has a real air of darkness, and it can be disturbing at times. But it also has to have an element of me in it, and not just me being serious and ‘poetic’ and literary and all that. It’s still my own voice, so it’s going to have other elements, not just seriousness. But I’m glad you’ve said that – I’m really pleased! People meet me and they’re surprised I’m not getting ready to throw myself off a bridge.

Whenever my daughter has friends round, she tells them I’m a writer and they expect me to be serious and strict and stern. But then we go to the pub and have a good laugh. It’s another difficulty that writers have when work is so personal. People do think they have a sense of who you are – in a way they have, but there’s also a big fantasy element. Everybody, to different degrees, lives in a fantasy world. I just use mine in my work.

We all feel longing in our lives. It’s beautiful. It’s an important part of our psychological make-up to be yearning for something. It’s what keeps us going. And I think often we don’t even want to get the thing we’re yearning for – once you’ve got the satisfaction, that period of yearning is over. That’s why so many love poems have been written about that state of not having what you want.

Not having what you want is a motivation to be a better person, to be beautiful, exist for something else. People make each other beautiful. I often have this desire with everyone I meet to try and bring something positive to that relationship. And with me I think it’s a redemption thing – if I can make things better for someone else, it might help me with some of the negative feelings I have.

When I started writing, I wrote a book-length poem about someone I couldn’t have. This man wrote these beautiful letters to me, and I was in love with his letters, his language, his poems. But when we spent time together, it didn’t work, because it was just a fantasy. Having what I wanted didn’t work. It’s important to accept that we have needs and passions that will never be met, but in that there is something vital. It’s okay to be passionately involved with people, because that’s what the human heart exists for. We shouldn’t suppress it.

Society tells us we have to suppress things in order to survive. So many people suffer from depression, but we all have to be functioning people in society. People like me who lose their minds are locked away so that society doesn’t see them, so that society continues to function. I had an experience of being completely disappeared by society so nobody could see the suffering I was going through.

I’ve been on so many psychiatric wards in so many different places so I’ve seen what happens. I’ve been in places where nobody was given any drugs, where people were allowed to go ‘mad’, and I’ve been in places where everybody was doped up and sedated.

In the poem I mention the ‘smackhead’. There was a man coming off heroin on a ward I was on. The palest person I’ve ever met – he was suffering severe withdrawal symptoms. I was besotted with him for months. We’d sit every day and smoke together. I was drugged up too – we couldn’t connect with each other through it. Sometimes I was so drugged up that I would just sit and watch him. He was suffering so much.

One day we were together and I was listening to a song called ‘Blue Chicago Moon’ by Songs: Ohia. It’s a beautiful song, and I gave it to him to listen to. I don’t think he really listened to music a lot, but I loved him and I wanted to share this music. He’d never showed any emotion the whole time I’d been there, but he cried when he listened to this piece of music. It goes back to my feeling about love songs – they’re so powerful.

That was a fantasy as well. I wasn’t well and I wanted somebody to love me, and I wanted to make him better and make him come off the heroin. Looking back it was silly, but having the experience of utter and complete closeness… for a four month period, we very rarely spoke to each other, but we would sit together and smoke cigarettes, and he was present and I was present and I felt a connection to him.

I find that connection easy to make but difficult to nurture. I’ve found myself often in situations where I have these intense feelings but I don’t know what to do with them. Actually I don’t think any of us do. We all have relationships and we have no idea what to do with them or how they work.

I’m obsessed at the moment with [the Romanian philosopher] Emil Cioran. I read his book On The Heights Of Despair when I was 19 and I fell in love with him. I thought he was the most brilliant man in the world. I read it again recently. He talks about the unstoppability of love, and about the irrationality of love. We have bonds and affinities with people for no rational reason. He talks about a spirituality that arrives when you feel passionate love.

I’m also reading Works Of Love by Kierkegaard. He talks about how you can’t get to the bottom of it and you shouldn’t try. Love is like a spring, which is beautiful on the surface, but you can’t see what’s going on underneath. And you shouldn’t try to dig it up. It doesn’t matter why you love someone. You’ve got the bond and that’s what life’s about.

There’s always hope. I’m not a pessimist. Emil Cioran is a pessimist. I love him because everything he writes is so dark. He must have experienced intense love to write about it like that. And even somebody that pessimistic and hardened has that child inside that says, ‘I want someone to love me.’ Everybody has that. That’s a gift. We have to experience pain because of it, but that’s part of it, and we can experience tremendous happiness too. After all the pain, I’m happy. I’m happy writing my poems. We can all be kind to each other and we can all love each other. It’s the pinnacle of human endeavour – everything that we strive for, everything that we do, is about the pursuit of love.