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.

Yemisi Blake and I met at the South Bank to talk about the next phase of his guest blogging.

Yem shows me his notebook. We discover that we both like hands and feet.

We talked about how some of the ideas behind ON are informing the way he notebooks. The H00die Project is looking great and we’ll showcase more of it here in the coming months.

We also decided to write a collaborative piece together on Open Notebooks. I suggested a renga and Yem liked the idea. This is a collaborative Japanese form, that utilises the 5-7-5 syllabic 3-line format of the Haiku, followed by a 7, 7 syllable 2-line verse that shifts the poem on. Check this site for more on renga.

Now here’s the EXCITING bit. Yem is off on a train trip round India with 350 creative young entrepreneurs.

Yem's Route Round India

So the Renga will document his travels with a post from each of the 13 stops. We’ll be moving from the season to season, hemisphere to hemisphere as I respond from the snow-driven streets of Blighty, incorporating the moon, a flower, love - as the renga form dictates - and subverting it by posting ‘haiku photos’ to complement each iteration.

I was inspired to write a Hai Bun recently: this is a short piece of prose/prose poetry followed by a haiku. The haiku’s relation to the text is non-linear, so it addresses the underlying heart/energy of the poem rather than the narrative. I’ll be writing some Hai Bun here - but replacing the closing haiku with a photograph that performs the same function. This is how we’ll aim to use the photographs in the renga.

Yem will text/email me his verses and images from India and I’ll upload them here. I get to start, as I invited Yem to take part in the renga. I’ll do that in a separate post so the piece builds.

I can’t wait. I’m off to start the first installment.

Today I received my first letter from Karen. Since our meeting on Monday I’ve had a strange expecting-post feeling - an excitement. The feeling comes in the morning, but of course the post doesn’t. But when I got home at 11pm, there it was. Karen sent her letter in a beautiful card with a picture of a bird - a symbol for our new correspondance. Here’s a half-light photo:

Inside was a pressed flower: white, with yellow stamens poking out, surrounded by grass-like shoots - like the veins of a leaf without the structure.  I’ll have to ask Karen what kind it is. Opening the envelope was pure delight. A letter holds so many possibilities, so simply.

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about letters this year. I sent and received hundreds of letters as a teenager, partly because I moved from the Scottish Highlands to Devon, leaving my best friends behind. In April this year, as part of the Slow Down London festival, I ran my first Creative Letter Writing Workshop at Foyles bookshop. The idea was to ask ‘What do letters mean now that they’re no longer an essential means of communication?’. For me, the answer to this is exciting, because I don’t know - they can become whatever we want - fragile documents found only in archives and museums, or a living form of writing that opens doors to the unexpected…

This Autumn I ran a series of ‘Snail Mail’ workshops, and received an amazing and certainly unexpected response. All sorts of people have shared stories - memories of opening letters, letter-inheritances from loved ones, the need to receive something physical in times of grief. One participant wrote a letter to her pair of walking boots, another to the science cabinet at his primary school, another to ‘flirtatiousness’. Some of these letters can be seen on my website.

As well as the workshops, I’m keen to explore letters and letter writing in my poetry. So I couldn’t have been happier when Karen invited me to start a creative correspondance. We haven’t imposed any criteria on ourselves - it will be organic and neither of us knows what will happen. I already feel inspired - receiving a carefully pressed flower, smelling faintly of the book it once lived in, has to be the start of something beautiful…

This is where I stop typing, and pick up my pen…

My last entry on Open Notebooks was on 30 July when I was waiting to give birth. In between then and now the worst thing that has ever happened to me happened: after a healthy pregnancy of 41 weeks I went in to a long labour that lasted for nearly five days all in all. It wasn’t until the morning of 7 August that the midwives picked up an irregularity in the baby’s heartbeat and I was rushed in to theatre for an emergency Caesarian. Unfortunately, the surgery was unsuccessful and after a long fight for life, our son Otto’s heart and lungs gave out. He was a first and a much longed-for child.

The rest of August is a blur of shock and grief. I think the body literally puts you into physical shock so you can cope with the spiritual and emotional turmoil. I didn’t know whether I would write or not, but as it turned out, it felt quite natural to open my notebook, start a journal and write poems about the experience.

A Parcel from Helen

The next question was whether I would share that process here. In many ways it was something I wanted to do: surely this was the point of Open Notebooks? The death itself had been necessarily public: pregnancy is a time of expectation and many of the physical changes in the body are obvious. Friends, family and colleagues await news. Yet the intensity and depth of grief felt inherently private. My Twitter, Facebook, online blogging and browsing were all abruptly halted. Even connecting to the internet to check email was something I was slow to do. I needed the quiet of trees and birds, to look at the sea not the screen.

The Beach at Cassis

A huge wave of support washed in from everyone we knew. The buzzer would sound and packages arrived. The parcels, notes of condolence, cards and flowers were a comfort, and something I came to enjoy, despite their provenance.

Abiye Sends Me 'The Poet Reclining' and Some Shades. There's a beautiful synchronicity to this package's arrival. All week I'd been working on a poem - in my mind was a long walk in the Luberon earlier in the summer I wanted to compare to a painting by Chagall, with a horse, green fields and a bruised-looking sky. There was something very particular about the colours and the atmosphere I wanted to catch but I couldn't quite conjure up the image. Abiye's gift came with a postcard of Chagall's The Poet Reclining - the very same image.

The Shades Were Hot Too

I began also to venture back online.  One day I clicked through to fellow poet Miriam Nash’s blog post about her creative letter writing workshops which explore the letter as a form. I loved this idea. I left a comment and also started to think about how I’d enjoyed the snail mail letters I’d received and how this experience related to the idea behind Open Notebooks.

With this in mind, Miriam and I met earlier this week and she’s going to be guest blogging on the site with me over the next few weeks.

Notebooks at the Ready

We’ll be sending each other snail mail letters, responding to the contents and using the correspondence to generate poems.

The Book of Stamps

I gave Miriam a book of stamps. She seemed very pleased with them. Now I need to write my first letter…