Katharine Hepburn said ‘never complain, never explain’. One thing I try never to do on Open Notebooks is offer excuses for extended absence. I also try to avoid extended absence. But now I have a very dear correspondent in the mix, so it is hard to keep to this resolve.

You will see I include Secret Number 6. This is because it is the not doing of this thing that has kept me away from the blog this month and a bit.

One thing that has happened since I received this letter with its fantastic back of envelope instructions is I have lost my notebook that contained the requested haikus. Losing the notebook was DEEPLY disruptive to my process. It threw me off kilter. I lose things more often than most people – this past 6 weeks I’ve lost: a Canon point and shoot camera, a SECOND pair of new prescription sunglasses and an expensive new badminton racquet. But the half-filled notebook was the thing that really got to me. What does it mean? Is there a larger significance to the things I let slip through my hands? The answer is undoubtedly too lengthy to contemplate here and now. Suffice to say I decided to start again with the haikus.

I resorted to a tried and tested formula: buy new stationery. In this case a rubber stamp kit where you set each character, like a hot metal press.

It was a wonderfully painstaking process and made me think about how much more slowly we used to live our lives.  Having to select each character with a pair of plastic tweezers and squash it into place really makes you think about what you’re saying.

I also wanted to make something for Miriam so she would know how important our correspondence is to me. Making something with your hands is one of the ways we express love. Maybe that’s why people get so passionate about modern conceptual artists who don’t make their own work. But love is also in ideas. And maybe even in Twitter?

Although I suspect that is pushing the point a little too far. But working with my hands helped connect me back to the heart, and that, for me is where the poetry lies.

Another month with 30 days and I’ll be prompting for the 30/30 crew (a group of poets working to write 30 poems in 30 days) every Monday, posting some of the result here and also posting up the prompts I set for anyone that wants to join in.

As I write this it’s Halloween — or the Pagan ‘New Year’ festival Samhain (literally meaning ‘the end of summer’). Bonfires were lit all over the country, pumpkins and gourds were harvested, and it marked the passage from the season of ‘day’ (summer) to that of ‘night’ (winter).

Photo courtesy of Naomi Woddis

It was also seen as a time when the veil between the living and the spirit world was at its thinnest. This festival is reiterated all over the world in different forms, from All Saints Day in Eastern Europe to the Day of the Dead in Latin America.

It is  a time of divination, when we honour our ancestors, meditate on the past, think forward into the future and contemplate the cycle of birth, death and renewal. I’ve been thinking about the idea of poetry being an attempt to influence the future…as a ‘spell’ that is cast, momentarily, over the reader.

Write a poem that tells us of an event that will happen in the future…it could be an event that HAS happened in the past, but is written in the future tense, or a poem that intuits the future, as a prophecy…

We decided to continue with 30/30 for the months with 30 days in them, so this is the first prompt for June.

• The human embryonic heart begins beating at around 21 days after conception. It is unknown how blood in the human embryo circulates for the first 21 days in the absence of a functioning heart.
• The average human heart beats 100,000 times a day and weighs the same as a small pigeon (around 10 oz)
• The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime–that’s enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.

WRITE  A POEM WHERE EACH LINE FEATURES A DIFFERENT BODY PART.

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.

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

Some sheep and ponies
in the fields that flicker past,
windscreen wipers on.

Red circle, white square:
a name for a new book.
Some sunshine at last.

The town clock strikes two.
A bus with misted windows
arrives at the stop.

On Friday I took a workshop with the poet Kwame Dawes. Kwame is one of the most inspirational teachers I know. At the end of the day I’d committed to writing a crown of sonnets and a haiku a day. The timescale? 100 days. I’ll be posting my haiku here.