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.

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