I decide to hand-write the new draft.

I’m getting quite distracted these days – can’t sit still too long, and my mind seems to jump around. But maybe I always was this way – as a child I used to write constantly to give those thoughts some room. The first job I had that stuck was as news sub-editor at
The Times. You had to focus or fail. Distraction did not enter my mind.

As I begin hand-writing the new draft, my thoughts slow to meet the pace. I realise that in making the first version of The Party from my notebook, I was a sub-editor: every unnecessary word sliced. I drafted for meaning. Order. Logic. But this is a story, not that kind of writing, and it won’t give up its meaning in that way.

I remember the child who sat alone listening in the silence, who wrote.

Self-portrait writing in my diary (Nan Goldin)

On the paper, I like shaping each word. It suits me. I can be emotional. If I am sad, I can write slowly, as with paint. Shaping each letter like a child who is learning to write. There is time to cry while you put the letters down. This page demands nothing, lets me be.

I use an HB pencil, which changes as you go on.

I can hear the melody and rhythm of each phrase. When
I finish I am peaceful and feel that despite the pace a lot got done.

Writing by hand connects me to the original experience as I recorded it in my notebook in Alamar. I am writing the same words, the same way I did back then.

This way I can breathe; I can move as I work. Writing is a visceral act, not an intellectual one. It is presence on the page. Nothing should come between us, no intermediary machine.

I write early in the morning, in a fluid, half-conscious state. I don’t think much about what I’m doing and the work seems to make itself. It’s like being that child again.

Last week, my 92 year-old grandmother passed away in the States. In my rush to grab a last-minute flight to go to the funeral, I packed a black skirt and top, my running shoes and one writing notebook. One! Just when I was finding it hard to live/work with only five!

On the flight, I wrote a poem for my grandmother’s service:

Graves Avenue

In memory of Hazel Langdon Page

(1917 – 2010)

the light and the dark of it

that house

we’d enter through the buttery-bright kitchen

where first thing he’d lift the dome

to check for chocolate cake

the voodoo doll

hung on a nail across from the cookie jar

its little brown body wound in threads

of yellow and red

the warm wood

of the long family table where we’d sit

in the company of chickadees and robins

beefy as quarterbacks and, feathery tailed

acrobats, those damn squirrels

the sun on your sandwich

the light tapered arc of a spider plant

then the armchair where you’d tuck up

your legs and lean in toward her

at her end of the sofa

the one cushion worn to a slope

crochet needles joined in tablets

of little sweater fronts and backs

and down the hall, a gallery

of high school photos

and things came from cold closets

photo albums, the Ouija board for contacting

the dead I confess now I would guide

one eye open

loose ends of stories of Indian blood

trailing through our veins

and fortune tellers

ferris wheels

she liked my story of a palm reader

who told me what I already knew

you have a large family, I can see here, like a net

or a spider web

some little lines broken

What I think of spider webs today

is simply, how mysterious, how strong

As I was writing the first draft, I did think momentarily that I was writing in the wrong notebook. The one I had brought was supposed to be for my Tate Modern course. Stuck on the plane with no choice, I felt a slight giddiness at my rule breaking (I know, I’m kind of a geek….) and then I thought it was a good lesson in reality, making do and, in a way something like thrift, all things my grandmother, and most of her generation, would have applauded.

Our writing ends up in different notebooks for different reasons, controlled by how methodical, anxious, sloppy or rushed we might be at the time. Academic work aside, the creative work will land where it lands and I think I’ll stay clear of controlling it as much as I originally wanted to. I think I’ll work on letting go.

I’m feeling today like I might disappear. Silent and remote. An image comes into my head – I look for it before I start. It’s a photograph of the actress Cookie Mueller, lying sick on her bed, being nursed through her final illness by ex-lover Sharon. On the wall is a picture of Cookie gettting married – to the man she left Sharon for, and who pre-deceased her of Aids.

Sharon nursing Cookie on her bed (Nan Goldin)

I look at this for a while. It gives me the right feeling, one I can not yet give words.

I start by hand-writing out chunks of text from my notebook: bits that leap off the page. These give me the emotional key to the story: ‘I sleep on the street if I have to … There were too many drunk people shouting, and Spanish exhausted me … At 3am I woke up and he was putting on his shoes saying: “We’re going. We’re leaving, going back to Havana” … I am not hungry. I want to go. I don’t want to eat anything else; no more meat. I just can’t eat any more. I won’t.’

I waver over some bits: how far into the personal should I go? I’m mining for the emotional truth but it’s fiction, not a journal. I reject passages that seem intimate but trivial, or too reflective. What I want is interior, but story – filtered through my narrator’s heart.

In the current draft of The Party, my Cuban friend Charo cries when the guests leave without eating the meat his cousin has bought. But my notebook tells a different story. There was a whole tussle between us – and only then did he cry: ‘I said I wanted to go back to Nelida’s and Charo got annoyed. I tried to explain how tired I was but he said that here in Cuba when you got to a party it’s for all night. Then I heard him telling Sandra we needed a taxi to Vedado so I finally got up and went into the bedroom and told her we were staying. I said Charo had drunk too much and Sandra said he’d told them this place wasn’t comfortable enough for me. So I said this wasn’t true and she dragged Charo into the bedroom to speak to him. He denied he’d said it and started to cry.’

'Here in Cuba, when you go to a party, it's for all the night.' (Claire Elliot)

The party was a drunken chaos. This comes across clearly from the notebook, whereas the final draft has only a few discrete references to ‘drinking rum’. My original words betray my confusion: ‘Lazaro grabbed me and motioned to Charo with two fingers next to each other. A question: “I need a girlfriend”. He leered at me, his eyes red and bloodshot. Earlier, his grace while dancing was lovely. Now he made me sick.’ I want the language of The Party, the narrator’s fractured report of what is going on, to mirror her dismay.

I begin to hear my story’s voice. I think of Jane Bowles, of How to Breathe Under Water – first-person, intimate work where the narrator has the courage to show who she is. I can get that close – why not? You always worry how much the reader will think a first-person narrator is ‘you’. But this is what the story needs.

So now I have two parallel versions of The Party: my current draft, and the mined bits from the notebook of the time. I type both out, then cut them into scenes, which I lay out on the floor, slotting the versions together. I do this quickly. At this point it’s not words; it’s a shape.
I make a shape. It’s all in the right place now.

I realise that the feeling Nan Goldin’s picture evoked, the one that resonated within me, was of self-effacement. Humility and courage. This is how the Cubans lived.

I realise that what resonates within you is the story waiting to be born. Before the story, comes its feeling, which you can not distinguish from your own.

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.