This coming year is all about reading. I won a scholarship to study for a masters and my plan is to use the time to read as much as I can. As readers of this blog will know I like to take photos, although I’ve been far less prolific recently; through NOT taking photos I’ve realised that photography is a big part of my creative process. I’m very much more connected to the world around me when I photograph it.

This summer I read Dostoyevsky's novella The Gambler. It's compulsive reading and was written in a month while he was writing Crime & Punishment. His publisher had got him to sign a contract handing over the rights to everything he had written or would ever write unless he delivered on time.

One of my aims with Open Notebooks is to think about how we can use the blog as a form in itself, to do something in the space that you wouldn’t do elsewhere. So the plan is to respond to a book of poetry in photographs and write about it on the blog. They won’t be traditional reviews in that I’m most interested in the emotional impact of the work and how this translates to the visual and how, in turn, this might influence my own writing.  They’ll also most likely be short.

Last month Jocelyn Page booked me to read at Lone Stars: Poetry and the American Imagination with Tamar Yoseloff and Hannah Lowe amongst others.

Hannah's biog says she's lived in Ilford, Santa Cruz ...

and Brighton.

I was excited to hear Hannah read as I’d read an article by her in The Rialto and was captivated by both her poetry and approach.

'...But this street/just links one dirty corner to another ...' from The Flowers on My Balcony in The Hitcher, Hannah Lowe (Rialto, 2011)

One of the things that caught my attention was the work which centred on her father who was Jamaican Chinese and a professional gambler. I also have a Jamaican father who has been known to like a flutter.

From Now That You Live in Hoxton. '...We were bored, I said, done with the chicken emporiums, pound shops/and chain pubs, no matter we'd fallen in love in/The Crown over pre-packed lasagne and 2-4-1 pints.'

Hannah’s work takes you to ‘dirty corners’ but there is a luminescence in its truth that makes these places magical. Even the Elephant is [almost] exotic. Her poetry is unflinching yet full of hope and light.  She writes about family, relationships, friends, love, sex, affairs. There’s a universal element to her work even though it’s very singular at the same time. It’s full of movement; she likes terza rima and it keeps the pace cracking along.

'You are reverent in the half light, splendid as a tree.' From The Picnic

These are poems that want to communicate and be understood. They made me feel like she and I live in the same city in similar yet very different ways.  I found her ability to inhabit her own, often crepuscular, landscape inspiring with its ‘dim-lit poker clubs’ and ‘the orange glint of cigarettes on balconies’. It made me want to go back to my journal and write what I feel; to say ‘so what if I’m writing ANOTHER elegy for my son’; and to meet her for a pint in The Crown.

You can read more about The Hitcher here.

to find my glasses I had invited Harry Man to be a Guest Booker.

I met Harry outside the Betsey Trotwood, a pub in Farringdon. We were both waiting to be allowed in to a Modern Poetry in Translation launch at the Freeword Centre. Harry has a mercurial mind and is a fascinating poet. He also likes mixed media collaborations and will be sharing an illustrated poetry project here.

Harry wrote me an email in the time it took for the kettle to boil. I loved this idea and given that we met while waiting, I thought  our collaboration could work on this same basis. So over the next few weeks, Harry and I will be writing poems, notes, scribbles in the time it takes to…

PHOTO RENGA. THIS IS A CALL AND RESPONSE POEM. IN EACH ITERATION NAOMI AND I SEND EACH OTHER A NEW HAIKU AND A PHOTOGRAPH. IN TRADITIONAL RENGA THE LINKING TEXT IS TWO SEVEN SYLLABLE LINES - HERE WE USE OUR PHOTOS INSTEAD. AS I INVITED NAOMI TO COLLABORATE WITH ME ON THIS, IT'S ALSO TRADITIONAL FOR ME TO START THE RENGA. THIS RENGA READS BACKWARDS ...SO IF YOU WANT THE FULL NARRATIVE START AT THE FOOT AND READ UP. OTHERWISE SCROLL DOWN...

Painted walls tell us

these sharp colours will beckon

daffodil, crocus.

Numbered paragraphs

illustrate simplicty;

joy of making dough.

Two circles, some squares.

Jasmine floats over roses

in the back garden.

Geometry rules

the stairway. An open door

is bold as sunshine.

A shaft of sunlight

brightens the darkest corner.

What looks soft is hard.

Heat and light reveal

hard edges of weather-worn

aging paving stones.

Clouds breed like rabbits

as the ground drys and hardens

cracks start to appear.

Everything has

its season. Dying roses

mimic cumuli.

Look up to catch luck

as it showers down unseen

but all embracing.

A heavy sky lives

in pond water. Thumb sized frogs

wait for a downpour.

Even a dead tree

has a purpose: as a host

for new leaves, regrowth.

Clouds scud without thought

landing on those that will last

just a short season.

Although delicate

the poppy petals hang on

as wind sweeps through corn.

A piercing of red

shoots through the green, pepper-hot

petals make their mark.

Above the beet field

clouds muscle in on blue sky.

Underfoot: cracked earth.

In a courtyard an

enamel bath sits and waits

for the Summer rain.

Uninterrupted

the scenery says its piece

to the croquet lawn.

The heat’s everywhere -

flames licking the air, the sun

returning their touch.

The gerberas look

up to the sun, are shocked

to find only one.

Over cups of tea

we look at the stars, but can’t

predict the winner.

An open goal leads

to quieter streets and pubs.

On one side blue sky.

An open door leads

on to heat and light, green leaves -

a rose petal falls.

A helicopter

flies overhead as dogs bark

and a Hoover dies.

Red and yellow ducks,

sitting pretty, pose for snaps

and ignore the heat.

A new day bristles

as the green parakeets screech.

With the heat comes dust.

Nightfall – lovers find

their comfort in marble wings,

the sky darkening.

A crush of petals

balanced on a single stem.

Night takes hours to fall.

This bright yellow smile

rules my kitchen. Cut flowers

know their time is short.

Roots swim up for air,

shoot leaves lighter than water.

A flower opens.

Crab claw, nettle sting -

spiked and sea-tossed, gaze skywards

to the scattered stars.

The sun continues

while white clouds float out to sea.

The beach is empty.

Pascale Petit is known for her vast imaginative reach, sharp editor’s eye and consumate craftmanship. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo is ‘a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo’s life and work’.

Pascale Petit on What the Water Gave Me for Open Notebooks from Karen McCarthy on Vimeo.

Listening to her read with the paintings projected behind her at the Old Horse Hospital in London last week, I was struck by just how integrated the paintings and the poems are — it was as if the paintings were speaking, not the poet or the artist. Pascale IS however speaking in this interview I had with her about her writing process, where she shares some early first drafts from a collection that was 10 years in the making.

The ideas are coming together.  I took Karen’s hawk photos as a starting point – I really want to work in the yellow of the hawk’s talons as a counterpoint to the calmer colours – and I found a feather at my allotment, and some more in a box when I was sourcing objects for another project. Scanned and solarised, they become something alien and unworldly.

I often work from photographs, so I took my camera to the Poetry Gazebo festival in Culpeper Community Gardens. I like the ‘hidden’ connections that are gathering in the print, with colours drawn from an event organised by Naomi Woddis, another Open Notebooks guest booker, and Karen reading her Wing poem as I took pictures of the greenness all around.  Next I searched my photo archives for images of leaves, water and wings. All these images are spread around me as I work on the colour sketches.

I was fascinated by the shape of Karen’s drafts for her own hawk poem; I hope to incorporate the form of her handwritten notes into the final print.

This isn’t live as in live TV but it is live in that I’ve written and posted my drafts as I go — so the process is transparent.

One of the photos I used as a prompt to help generate the poem.

One of the things I do when I’m writing is read other poetry books. I write down quotes and snippets that stand out or relate to my train of thought..

When I set the Hawk Prompt I also picked out this quote by Carolyn Forche, but when I wrote my rough draft I didn't respond to this, although I find that sound is very closely connected to the emotional tenor of my work.

Now as work on this edit I’ve returned to my original notes/free write. I rarely write poem drafts in lineated form. The messier my first draft the more likely it is to produce something worth working on.

I realise also I'm back on a subject I've been avoiding: grief. I don't want to bang on about my angst - but this is where the emotional heart seems to lie. I also picked up Sharon Olds' One Secret Thing in the library. Sometimes I find her work claustrophobic (if brilliant) but reading the first poem in the book 'EVERYTHING' that opens 'Most of us are never conceived./Many of us are never born -/we live in a private ocean for hours,/weeks... really heartened me and gave me the permission I needed to keep writing about this personal subject.

Re-reading my early scrawl I can see that the opening I’d originally marked for deletion, may just be where the poem needs to move towards: ‘I am most interested in the feet and claws’. In the notes above, it’s my son’s feet that I move towards.

The next step is to think about whether this is one or two poems. Is it the hawk or the child? Or is it hawk and child? Now I’ve finished scanning pages I’m going to go back to my notebooks for a bit, see what I get next.

Showing this kind of rough edit is uncomfortable I have to say: this is definitely in my discard pile. It's also disconcerting, changing my mind in public like this, but that's the constant part of the editing process. Trying new things. But it's interesting as a process: to identify the true ambition of the poem - not in terms of its syntactical realisation - but in the 'what does it want be/do' kind of way.

Yes, I definitely think it’s two poems. This new verse arrangement seems to have honed it down a bit – it feels more right like this.

I realise that what I was chasing here is the idea of being able to see an animal very close up - a wild animal. I once saw this fox that had just been run over, and it was all still perfect. It was fascinating. That moment when something's not long dead and still has the life in it. That's different to this, but this idea of proximity - as in Wing - is still there.

April was an intense month. Firstly because I had committed to the 30/30 challenge to write a poem a day for 30 days, and secondly because I got married on 1 May.

Another 'notebook' entry: signing the register

I completed 18 poem drafts, which is a lot for me. I was also designated to provide a weekly prompt. The quality of the prompts amongst the group was high and I wanted to provide something that was stimulating and resonant. Ironically, I didn’t get much from my prompt in terms of a poem — perhaps because I’d expended a lot of creative energy on the prompt itself.

Scroll down to read the prompt in full…

I’ve invited the 30/30 poets who took part to share their poems/drafts here, along with comments about the process and I’m delighted to include a selection on Open Notebooks.

ANNE WELSH
The hawk poem (No. IV in the sequence) I wrote straight after viewing your
video, straight into my Facebook notes.

Then I copied it into my notebook and a couple of weeks later make the pencil changes to it.

Once I was happy with it, I rotated my notebook 90 degrees and copied it out as a final draft. I always
write my final drafts on the 90 degree angle so if I am at an open mic, I can flick through my notebook and find recent final drafts quickly.

And here the final poem:

You have rendered the hawk’s eyes obsolete,
broken in the river like the one I loved first.

To dream of crows is to long for sadness
but it’s the hawk’s competitive spirit

I cannot understand. You hold my hand
in the darkness, kiss me awake.

What intrigues me is Annie’s process of typing first, straight into Facebook, then copying that into her notebook and continuing with her edits in long hand. This forms part of a sequence Annie wrote throughout 30/30 — her first — and as the poems and the story unfolded day by day I became hooked on the sense of serialisation.

ANDREA ROBINSON

Draft 1

And the edited version with indented layout.

NAOMI WODDIS

To Dream of Hawks

What news do you have for me, hawk?
Your dead eye frozen, caught staring

at a flat sky, your talons the colour
of daffodils, your wings as beautiful

as they ever were in flight. This stream
is deaf to the dead branch of your body.

Your tiny head cooled by its rush of water,
what message do you have for me now?

AOIFE MANNIX

JOCELYN PAGE

I found it fascinating, the different responses: some referring directly to the hawk itself, others working the bird into the poem. The themes around death and resurrection following on from an earlier prompt. The intensity of writing a new draft each day brings an immediacy to the work — that original energy that can often get lost as we hone and refine. The 30/30 group is closed, so writers can produce drafts outside of the critical, public gaze, so I’m particularly grateful to have the work to include here in its earlier incarnations. It’s not easy, releasing poems when they are still embryonic.
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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.

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.