Writers often get notebooks as presents. Since blogging on this site last week I’ve received two! There is a temptation, when you hold a new journal in your hands and flip through its blank, expectant pages, to start to fill it and give it character. (One book I got for Valentine’s Day has a Dennis the Menace cover, inspiring the idea of a nascent genre of the graphic poetry collection….)

For me, the vibe of the cover is an unassailable influence. My academic books are all black, but I’ve reserved a little aquamarine journal for my bedside.

It is a book reserved for experimentation. I’ve recently begun a PhD at Goldsmiths looking at the concept of vatic voice, as developed by American poet Donald Hall. Hall suggests in his essays that taking naps can be a way of keeping poetry fresh by ‘the experience of losing control and entering a world of freedom.’ (1)

I’m not in the enviable position of being able to take a daytime kip; however, I keep this particular notebook by the bed for any late-night, middle-of-the-night, first-thing-in-the-morning scribbling. What lands in the aquamarine book is often fragmented, barely legible, dreamlike sketches of lyric and image.

I love the magical quality of this bedside friend. It contains stuff that is probably closest to my gut – rumblings that stay with me during the day, that make my insides flutter with possibility. If I tried to place this into one of Anna Wulf’s (2) notebooks, it would probably straddle her emotional and writing journals. But that certainly wouldn’t give it justice. It holds the words that are the seeds of poems and, as such, they are private and precious – to categorize them would feel wrong and yet I’ve done just that by giving them their own notebook. But where I often end up cross –fertilizing ideas and drafts in any old notebook to hand (out of circumstance or laziness), I wouldn’t dream of scratching these dreams in the same notebook as, say, lecture or bibliographic notes.

There seems to be a priority of value in a sense – the aquamarine notebook would be my own personal golden notebook, the essence of the real me, and best fit to Doris Lessing’s so-called feminist doctrine, perhaps the truest representation of me as a writer and a woman.

1. From Donald Hall’s Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2003, (pg. 29)

2. The protagonist from Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook.

The post has been sneaky. On Thursday I opened my letterbox to find one of my letters to Karen returned by Monsieur La Poste – the address label must have peeled off in the cold interior of the postbox. On the same day, my forward-mail from London arrived, including a card sent by Karen on 17th December… part of our correspondence making a late entrance. In some ways this is apt. Because it takes a while for our letters to travel from Geneva to London and back, they often overlap – I’m not always sure which letter Karen is responding to, but I like the guessing, the calculating, the chance arrivals…

Here is a post-van I caught speeding away in the Old Town:

I don’t think letter writing is dying, but escaping, changing into something else, speeding down the road in a yellow van. I wrote a lot of letters this week, including one to my Godmother, who I had lost contact with for about seven years, and who found me again through my blog. We used to keep a ‘letter book’ – a small book we sent between the UK and the US, writing new entries to each other over time. It was a bit like a secret blog between two people, or a shared notebook.

My 'letter-workshop' from my week of letters

Before I read Karen’s ‘Wing’ on the blog, I received it on the back on a yellow bird. I do think sending a poem in a letter can give it the secrecy to breathe and come alive as Karen quotes below. Secrecy brings excitement, an impulse to continue or take the poem elsewhere. It makes it more like a curious object, that can be looked at from several angles and appear different. It moves it outside of the person who wrote it.

The 'Wing' I received

The yellow messenger

Is Karen is one step ahead of this blog post? Has she received my latest letter? Partners in crime La Poste and Royal Mail keep this a secret…

This is an excerpt from my poem, Wing

We find you, dear Wing,
in the half-dark
on the way back from the piglets…

I played around a lot with the PIGLETS … taking this line in and out of the poem. But I realised that it was integral to the whole energy and emotion of the piece. It was the SOUND of the piglets snufflilng and snorting, and this sense of life and innocence they evoked I was chasing in the poem. I realised their inclusion was essential, without them I couldn’t HEAR that noise –  and it was this Click through to see the video. Including this hyperlink and writing the poem up here helped create the draft. I wanted to create a poem with links, and in so doing I realised that that was an important step in creating the atmosphere of the piece.

I also took video diary when I was pregnant, and the lines:

you are solid but unseen, mysterious
as a somersault inside the womb;

were also influenced by the film making process. Well, not the process of making a film, to be more precise the process of using film as a notebook journaling device. So many invisible elements go in to the making of a poem; ones that we forget more often than not; but that’s okay also. Their being lost is part of the poem becoming whole.

I am a poet. During an average week I do many things: I teach, I perform, and I fundraise to support my projects. I am a MPhil/PhD student in the Creative Writing course in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths. Of course, I write poetry, and I sometimes experiment with the short story and the novella. I attend peer and mentor workshops and I read a lot. This is on top of being a mother of two young boys and a community volunteer. I am stretched and scattered and love the variety of my life.

Having so many roles, you might think I’m forced by my circumstances to be extra organized, but I’m not. I am, by nature, a relatively neat and ordered person; however, I am loath to tidy and categorize my writing life for fear it will somehow sabotage my creativity. I worry that I run the risk of hemming in my thoughts by neatly filing everything away and destroying the free, organic nature of my imagination.

Last month, I read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Lessing’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, keeps four colored notebooks, one for each part of her life: politics, day-to-day events, emotions and her writing life. This got me thinking about my own practice – could it be contained so neatly? Would keeping distinct notebooks for all my different types of writing – research, free writing, notions, plots, revision, etc. help or hinder me? And the computer – how do I treat that? Is it essentially another type of notebook, or more of a final destination for the handwriting that ‘graduates’ and is destined for public consumption? These are the questions guide me on the start of a practice-based academic career. I’ll get out my notebooks and begin.

Jocelyn Page is an exciting new American poet from rural Connecticut who lives in London. We both attend a seminar group once a month with Moniza Alvi and have got to know each other at various workshops over the past year.

Jocelyn has been reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Over the next few weeks she’ll echo Lessing’s approach of dividing her life into four discrete notebooks and report on the results as a guest blogger on Open Notebooks.

This brings to mind a poem by Annie Freud, The Things We Do, where she writes:

“I have tried to have a system, and I do have one or two;
on the cover of this notebook, I have written
Only Poetry. I have stamps. I have a plan
for a display of streptocarpus on the window sill.”

Is looking out of the window daydreaming a system?

Whenever I read Annie Freud’s The Best Man There Ever Was I feel inspired to write, in one of my ‘poetry only’ notebooks, that inevitably gets corrupted with other detritus as time wears on. Currently I’m working to a journal/poems rational, but inevitably the odd scribble escapes or intrudes depending. The other day, as I was note-taking about an event where I’ll talk about the findings of Open Notebooks I took notes in my ‘bread and butter work only’ notebook, not my ‘creative projects’ notebook, where I’d retrospectively file it:

“All literature needs secrecy to breathe and come alive. The secret is what you pass on to the reader. A whispered thing.”

I just scrolled back and have seen Miriam’s post which expands on this idea in the context of letter writing and intimacy, something I’ll be talking about in more detail at Spread the Word’s event this Saturday Tapping the Trend.

I’m off to write a letter now (I have stamps), but keep an eye out for Jocelyn’s notebook in the next few weeks. She’s a beguiling writer and I’ve no doubt her notebooks will be at least as enigmatic as her poems.

‘… stick secrets under stamps, conceal

guilt with ink and hand-scrawl love…’

Lines from my ‘Decadence’ poem, realised in Karen’s latest letter to me – a secret written under the envelope seal:

Secret message - will it survive?

It was very difficult to open it without destroying the secret, but finally I found the right way of tearing the paper. I won’t share the message here, because it is, after all, a secret.

Today I’ve been reading about the world of Mail Art. Some say Mail Art was started by Cleopatra, when she sent herself to Caesar in a rolled up carpet. According to mail-art.de, Mail Art is about ‘sending something artful’ – exactly what every letter from Karen is to me.

I also found some poems by Bruce Snider about letters, post and postmen. Here’s an excerpt from ‘Nostalgia’, from his collection The Year We Studied Women:

There are no letters,

just flyers for cheap washing machines,

ethernet lines surging with e-mail,

telephones crackling

like hot grease. Outside,

the postman wonders

past junk shops and paper

stores, listening to the old postcards

hum quietly their messages:

having a great time, Dear Mary,

why don’t you write anymore?

-

There are also poems called ‘Letter to an Imagined Lover’ and ‘True, My Father is a Postman’ in the collection. I had no idea the book touched on letter writing when I ordered it on Amazon. I feel the ideas in ‘Nostalgia’ are similar to those in ‘Decadence’, which still needs to be reworked…

Open Notebooks has inspired me to make my own notebooks more exciting. I’ve bought some soft pencils and have started sketching again after years. Here are some sketches from the Museum of Art and History in Geneva:

Jeune fille trayant une vache (after Karel Dujardin) and other sketches

Messy page with horse, pistol and plate pattern

La charité romaine profile

My sketches are also influenced by my correspondence with Karen:

Lakeside swan

I’m writing, but not always the poems I think I’ll write or the ones I plan to write. Instead they are more like sketches, arriving when I’m walking and something – a thought or an object – catches my attention and I take it home for my notebook. I love this website by Jane Campion, the director of Bright Star. It’s basically an open scrapbook: www.brightstarthemovie.com. Oops! Karen don’t look yet. It follows my next letter…

I found this grey wing in the twilight last week and I’ve been drafting and redrafting around it ever since. I’ve been struggling to capture the essence of it which was like the sound of someone breathing quietly in a room overlooking an orchard. Not someone sleeping, someone standing at a window.

It makes me feel exposed, sharing a page like this – the stuff I write when I can’t get where I want to go. But that’s often where the heart of the poem lies I find. In the scribble where I wrestle with what I’m really trying to say.

It also demonstrates the structure of how I work. When I’m writing I often stack up books I want to read in the library: the choices can be quite random as well as more focused. Then I dip into them when I get stuck on a draft. The Seamus Heaney quote from a poem in The Fragment was heartening as I struggled with a beginning, never mind the end.

I also found this quote from Socrates who says the poet is ‘light, winged and holy’ and wrote it out in my book.

I find copying out quotes and other peoples' poems helps me relax when I'm stuck on a draft.

Writing words that aren’t you’re own takes away the pressure ‘to be inspired’ and frees you up. You’re writing without thinking, then your own words can start to break through. I’m not sure it’s always the rather lofty sounding inspiration Socrates talks about, but it’s a drop of sweat in the ocean. I like how the word ‘winged’ flew in. I did want more of a sense of lightness – and flight, but it wasn’t until a later draft – after re-reading one of my letters from Miriam – that I realised I had to get off the ground somehow. I am now working on it as a letter form poem.

Meanwhile, I found some yellow things.

Two girls from Camberwell Art School set up a pop up gallery in Brixton and made plaster casts of bananas from the market. The skins are real but when you drop one on the floor it clunks in a very unbananalike manner.