A week has gone past with no writing. On Sunday I heard that I did not get the grant I was hoping for, and it was hard to focus after that. Today, though, I know I must start again and I am glad to see there is blue outside the window, so I go for a walk in the park. This is what I do first because it settles my mind.

I think about The Party. This is the story I’m reworking using original notebooks, written in Cuba a few years ago. There is the static ‘final’ version I’ve produced, which seems to have no soul, and a lot of ragged material from the time. I can’t find the way in. How to connect the two?

Yesterday, I went to hear Biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg speak. She looked into the text and asked, how do we find our voice?

Moses, it is said, had a speech impediment, and when God asked him to talk to the people, Moses replied: ‘I can not be heard. The people are not going to believe me. They will not listen to my voice.’

‘But,’ said God, ‘it does not matter that you have not the eloquence of Aaron - he could not get my message across. I want you to speak for yourself.’

In the act of writing, Avivah said, we accept our own otherness, rather than rejecting it. And the reader, encountering this otherness within the work, meets hidden aspects of themself. Reader and writer create one another, as did Moses and God.

Aaron was eloquent, but communicated nothing. Moses, who stammered and stuttered, was the one people heard.

I put my two versions of The Party side by side. As the story stands, there is little indication of the tension between the narrator and her surroundings. There is nothing to show her distance from Charo, the Cuban friend who has brought her to the party, and his family. I’ve smoothed it all out. Only one paragraph expresses her (mild) estrangement:

“I took a rest on Ramón’s lumpy bed and, shivering in the chill wind of the dusk, covered myself with the yellow candlewick bedspread. Charo brought me meat and lemonade. I curled into a ball on one side, hands in front of my face, but could not shut out the fretful, insistent shouting of the guests. It seemed to be coming from only a few feet away – outside the window and just beyond the bedroom door.”

But what I wrote originally about that night was much rougher. Here are some extracts from my notebook:

I decide to retell The Party in this voice. My narrator will still observe the life around her, but will also report the life within herself. I’m going to try weaving segments of writing from the notebooks into the narrative I already have - and see how the patchwork turns out.

It’s not so much that I want to write ‘the truth’ of that night, but more that I want to find the stammering emotional centre of the experience, and return this to the work.

As the white boat glides
along the wide brown river
bare branches shiver.

A trumpet, a train, a gull.
In the distance a footbridge.

Pinpricks of snow fall
on the abandoned roadworks.
The pavement is cold.

Tomorrow oysters, people
and the clink of champagne flutes.

The recollection
of Christmas is distant, caught
between seasons, waiting.

Today a sharp Winter sun,
a hint of what’s to come - warmth.

This is my first edit of ‘Decadence’. I can almost see the next draft in my mind, so I’m posting this version quickly before it disappears into the waste paper bin - or, more realistically, the stack of lonely files at the back of my hard drive.

I begin all my poems by hand, and I pretty much have to hide my laptop from myself until I’m ready to edit. I’m far too eager to type up a new poem before it’s fully formed and start editing it before it’s even learned to crawl. Then the poem ends up with one leg on the ceiling and the other in the fridge. Not a good look. A keyboard and screen bring out the critic in me. Pen and paper make me more lenient and I can allow myself to write freely. But my laptop is essential when it comes to editing. Here’s the draft:

DECADENCE
Geneva, January 2010

The city’s post boxes are yellow.
Colour of decadence,

of the book that stirs young Dorian Gray
to taste forbidden dreams.

Yellow as Van Gogh’s chair,
as flowers that follow sun or look too long.

While other click and send
I lick and bend brown envelopes,

stick secrets under stamps, conceal
guilt with ink and hand-scrawl love.

What text contains a wet stain
of regret or drop of rain?

Instant messaging can’t hold
the weight of the unsaid.

I revel in the faded; bananas
at the point of turning, old tobaccoed hands.

At the yellow box, I squeeze my letter
once for luck, then let it drop.

I hope it reaches her this week.
My cheeks glow evening suns

as I imagine hands,
the sharp edge of a butter knife,

fingers touching paper,
touching my fingers where I have touched.

And because editing can sometimes lack colour, here’s some yellow I discovered, looking through old photos:

Spring gorse in Findhorn Village, Scotland

Singaporean postbox

The poem hasn’t changed dramatically yet. I’ve played around with the form and put it in couplets (it seems to fit nicely), I’ve tightened up some lines and moved ‘Geneva’ to the subtitle to try and avoid a clunky first line. One subtle change was suggested by Raymond Antrobus - ‘white triangle lids’ has become ‘brown envelopes’. Concrete and definitely better. And how did Raymond come to have a hand in editing this poem? We’re both members of the Vineyard.

The Vineyard is an international, online community of poets, led by Jacob Sam-La Rose. Emerging and established poets share their work, give and receive feedback and discuss anything and everything to do with poetry. Our styles and methods are diverse, but we all share a commitment to working our craft, hard. The ‘yard (as we usually call is) is an essential part of my writing process. If a poem stays in my notebook or on my computer, it usually never makes it out of the house. Sharing my work on the ‘yard gives me the confidence to change it, improve it and eventually share it publicly. Here, you’re getting a peak into the early life of a poem. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t call this ‘ready’.

I’m not a troublemaker, I swear.

So why, just as I’ve got into blogging about my notebooks, am I inclined to sneak away from writing in a notebook at all? I think I’ll blame it on my artist friend, Sharon Willson-Imamdin, who has just moved to Perth, Australia. She and I have just begun a collaboration modeled on the experiment between poet Philip Gross and photographer Simon Denison (as profiled in Writing in Education, National Association of Writers in Education, issue 49). Sharon and I are sending first drafts by e-mail: me, poetry and Sharon, on the canvas. Her painting informs my writing, and then my poem feeds into her further painting, etc. We’re essentially building a body of work together, via the Internet. It’s an immediate and exciting practice!

Untitled painting by Sharon Willson-Imamdin

Now in thinking about where to write these collaborative drafts, I wanted a distinct home for them – somewhere special. Given the swift timescale of our work (I’ve been responding to her paintings at the rate of one or two a day) a notebook almost felt too anchored. My poems were going onto the computer within an hour of starting to draft. So, I decided to scribble on pieces of paper out of the recycling pile. How fresh it has felt to not have to choose a notebook! Of course, some people routinely write directly on the computer like it is a type of notebook. I’m pretty certain that writing very early drafts on the screen affects all sorts of aspects of poetry – form is probably fixed too soon, line breaks may be decided on a purely visual basis and further revision could possibly be hampered as the poem does seem to be ‘finished,’ albeit artificially.

drafting on recycled paper

And what about this that I’m writing right now? This too has an urgency due to the fact that it’s going into Wordpress pretty darn quickly. But an unexpected thing has happened. I have intuitively chosen to write these Open Notebook entries in a journal that I had reserved for all things related to a collective that I attend, Malika’s Kitchen. As Karen goes to the Kitchen sessions as well, it seemed natural. So now the Kitchen notebook has morphed into ‘Karen’s’ notebook. Come to think about it, I have also subconsciously created a notebook for meetings with my PhD supervisor, Stephen Knight. That journal is my ‘Stephen’ notebook. I also have a ‘Moniza’ notebook for a seminar with Moniza Alvi and a book for a Tate Modern activity with Pascale Petit. So I’ve got my subject books to categorize my work /study/life writing, and I’ve also got books which delineate for whom the writing is done. It is a shortcut to identifying which notebook I need to grab at the last second as I dash for the train…

How did Doris manage with only five?!

In Notting Hill Gate
sun brightens the stucco walls.
A new month begins.

Now the rain has stopped
the parakeets are noisy
and the soil is soft.

Hats and gloves come off
inside the vintage dress shop:
red lipstick, blond hair.

I am going to start with The Party. This is the first short story that I ever wrote. Living in a small, dark room in Havana, I decided to write. I read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande, and she said that anyone could write stories, so long as they paid attention to their life, and didn’t get too fancy. And I saw her point. I didn’t understand how anyone could invent anything. The core story, the emotional one, is always true of its author’s life. It’s always their voice, small or unheard, one they may never dare express, embodied in the work.

Bakery in Vedado, Havana. The words read: Por la dignidad de la patria, movilizacion cederista - For the dignity of the homeland, local mobilisation

I am disappointed with The Party. It reads as if I took the best, raw, bits of writing from the notebooks at the time, and polished them into what I thought a short story was supposed to be. I wanted to remove myself from the work, but in doing so threw baby out with bathwater, so that the story had no point of view - or a ghostly narrator about whose feelings we know little, with whom we can not emotionally engage.

What I thought when I re-read source material in my notebooks for The Party. They contained much that was left out of the final draft

I need to go back to the source material and experience that party again. I was a stranger there - overwhelmed and bewildered in Alamar, a Havana suburb, with no other foreigner for miles around. Nothing made any sense and I was writing to escape from overwhelming claustrophobia in a poor town where I understood little, and could not make myself understood. Each point of reference dissolved. Cross-purposes, my broken Spanish, the order of the day. This is the core of the story, and I realise that so far, I have lied: The Party is serene and the ‘I’ who narrates a calm and happy woman, unaffected by events. For honesty’s sake, I must get the dissonance back in.

Miriam sent me an origami Valentine. It was very exciting to receive in the post and I would have posted more on it sooner, but I was ‘between printers’ and have only just got my new scanner up and running. I decided to use it as a base for a freewrite. I’ve never posted a freewrite before. Or written one knowing that it would be public. So here it is: unedited. Cliches and all.

Five cyclamen bulbs
and a red anemone:
will tolerate shade.