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.
Miriam sent me an origami Valentine. 
It was very exciting to receive in the post and I would have posted more on it sooner, but I was ‘between printers’ and have only just got my new scanner up and running. I decided to use it as a base for a freewrite. I’ve never posted a freewrite before. Or written one knowing that it would be public. So here it is: unedited. Cliches and all.
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.
Day 1
Seven hour roast lamb
and rhubarb panacotta.
A bustling market.
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.
Karen McCarthy was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
Check her website for more.
