I type the word ‘pantoum’ and already the autocorrect feature in WordPress is converting it into the word ‘phantom’ as if the word itself is struggling to remain ethereal and abstract. I read somewhere that the form ‘excites resistance’.

The original Malay ‘pantun’ / ‘pantum’ or ‘two cut’ was a poem designed to be written aa bb. The two couplets ought to have entirely separate subjects which are linked thematically eg. stillness: a single bird on a powerline and snow on the roof of a parked car. Malay poets use the first couplet for fine natural observations while the second couplet has a focus on what this means to the human subject. Following our progression the bird on the powerline and the snow could easily have a concluding couplet about being paralysed in the face of a powerful decision, or to be true to the instincts of the bird we could remove the potentially dangerous aspect of electrocution and the poem could become about safety, vantage and opportunity.

Whatever our decision is will inherently steer the poem’s displacement. Thanks to a bit of history, of which more here, we expect the form to do something different now and it has entire lines, repeated. The lines should fall like this: [1st verse] first line, second line, third line, fourth line, [2nd verse] second line repeated, fifth line, fourth line repeated, sixth line. This reminds me of something else that repeats itself, is abstract and ‘excites’ my ‘resistance’. Automated customer service lines.

It’s relatively easy to get into a loop with automated customer services numbers. With my bank all I have to do is push * then 1 then * then 1 and so on. The recorded Mancunian accent on the other end of the line doesn’t flinch when thanking me for my choice, “Thanks. Okay I now have four options for you.”

What I really needed was a customer services robot that would respond to written human input. There are various reservoirs of amazing programs that work in a customer services capacity. It was time to test out some robots!

This robot is Cleverbot:

Here is Ikea’s robot who finds love difficult:

This one is an insurance salesman in France. I am asking him if he believes in God. It’s a surprisingly pertinent question as ‘an act of God‘ is often cited in insurance contracts:

This is Brian (clearly rather big headed).

Then I found Lucy.

By necessity we have to start from a point of natural input. While punching buttons it didn’t take long for the idea to settle that in order to get a good loop going I need someone who sounded as unquestionably grateful and acceptably sympathetic as my Mancunian banker. I will never be able to have a conversation with him. He is just a voice in the aether.

Jane Austen was a writer of substantial wit, bravery and skill. So I’m sure she wouldn’t mind my choosing Mr. Darcy who is in my  view both unquestioning and incurious to the point where I struggle to take his character seriously beyond the realm of a plot Macguffin. Darcy raises just three questions throughout the entirety of Pride and Prejudice. I fed these three questions in various forms through the bots, but it wasn’t until I arrived on his letter that I struck gold with Lucy and we started to get the repeating lines of a pantoum with that same sense of infuriation. Apart from lines one and three, the rest was pulled from their dialogue. Here is the result:

Conversation Between Mr. Darcy and O2 Customer Services Robot ‘Lucy’ During Mr. Darcy’s Unfortunate Transformation into an O2 Customer Services Robot

Mr. Darcy: I must now mention a circumstance which I would wish to forget myself, and which no obligation less than the present should induce me to unfold to any human being.
Lucy Robot: I’m sorry but I won’t be able to answer such a long question.
Mr. Darcy: You may imagine what I felt and how I acted.
Lucy Robot: I’m sorry but I have not fully understood your question. Please see the FAQs.

Mr. Darcy: I’m sorry but I won’t be able to answer such a long question.
Lucy Robot: Apology accepted, what else can I help you with?
Mr. Darcy: I’m sorry but I have not fully understood your question.
Lucy Robot: I’m glad you understand.

Mr. Darcy: Apology accepted?
Lucy Robot: Unfortunately I have been unable to recognise your question.
Mr. Darcy: I’m glad you understand.
Lucy Robot: I still couldn’t recognise your question.

Darcy Robot: I’m sorry I didn’t recognise your question, please can you rephrase this?
Lucy Robot: Apology accepted, what else can I help you with?
Darcy Robot: I still couldn’t recognise your question.
Lucy Robot: I’m sorry I didn’t recognise your question.

=

Want to see more? Cornell University have conducted some interesting experiments with chat bots talking to one another, more here

This is an excerpt from my poem, Wing

We find you, dear Wing,
in the half-dark
on the way back from the piglets…

I played around a lot with the PIGLETS … taking this line in and out of the poem. But I realised that it was integral to the whole energy and emotion of the piece. It was the SOUND of the piglets snufflilng and snorting, and this sense of life and innocence they evoked I was chasing in the poem. I realised their inclusion was essential, without them I couldn’t HEAR that noise –  and it was this Click through to see the video. Including this hyperlink and writing the poem up here helped create the draft. I wanted to create a poem with links, and in so doing I realised that that was an important step in creating the atmosphere of the piece.

I also took video diary when I was pregnant, and the lines:

you are solid but unseen, mysterious
as a somersault inside the womb;

were also influenced by the film making process. Well, not the process of making a film, to be more precise the process of using film as a notebook journaling device. So many invisible elements go in to the making of a poem; ones that we forget more often than not; but that’s okay also. Their being lost is part of the poem becoming whole.

‘… stick secrets under stamps, conceal

guilt with ink and hand-scrawl love…’

Lines from my ‘Decadence’ poem, realised in Karen’s latest letter to me – a secret written under the envelope seal:

Secret message - will it survive?

It was very difficult to open it without destroying the secret, but finally I found the right way of tearing the paper. I won’t share the message here, because it is, after all, a secret.

Today I’ve been reading about the world of Mail Art. Some say Mail Art was started by Cleopatra, when she sent herself to Caesar in a rolled up carpet. According to mail-art.de, Mail Art is about ‘sending something artful’ – exactly what every letter from Karen is to me.

I also found some poems by Bruce Snider about letters, post and postmen. Here’s an excerpt from ‘Nostalgia’, from his collection The Year We Studied Women:

There are no letters,

just flyers for cheap washing machines,

ethernet lines surging with e-mail,

telephones crackling

like hot grease. Outside,

the postman wonders

past junk shops and paper

stores, listening to the old postcards

hum quietly their messages:

having a great time, Dear Mary,

why don’t you write anymore?

-

There are also poems called ‘Letter to an Imagined Lover’ and ‘True, My Father is a Postman’ in the collection. I had no idea the book touched on letter writing when I ordered it on Amazon. I feel the ideas in ‘Nostalgia’ are similar to those in ‘Decadence’, which still needs to be reworked…

Open Notebooks has inspired me to make my own notebooks more exciting. I’ve bought some soft pencils and have started sketching again after years. Here are some sketches from the Museum of Art and History in Geneva:

Jeune fille trayant une vache (after Karel Dujardin) and other sketches

Messy page with horse, pistol and plate pattern

La charité romaine profile

My sketches are also influenced by my correspondence with Karen:

Lakeside swan

I’m writing, but not always the poems I think I’ll write or the ones I plan to write. Instead they are more like sketches, arriving when I’m walking and something – a thought or an object – catches my attention and I take it home for my notebook. I love this website by Jane Campion, the director of Bright Star. It’s basically an open scrapbook: www.brightstarthemovie.com. Oops! Karen don’t look yet. It follows my next letter…

I found this grey wing in the twilight last week and I’ve been drafting and redrafting around it ever since. I’ve been struggling to capture the essence of it which was like the sound of someone breathing quietly in a room overlooking an orchard. Not someone sleeping, someone standing at a window.

It makes me feel exposed, sharing a page like this – the stuff I write when I can’t get where I want to go. But that’s often where the heart of the poem lies I find. In the scribble where I wrestle with what I’m really trying to say.

It also demonstrates the structure of how I work. When I’m writing I often stack up books I want to read in the library: the choices can be quite random as well as more focused. Then I dip into them when I get stuck on a draft. The Seamus Heaney quote from a poem in The Fragment was heartening as I struggled with a beginning, never mind the end.

I also found this quote from Socrates who says the poet is ‘light, winged and holy’ and wrote it out in my book.

I find copying out quotes and other peoples' poems helps me relax when I'm stuck on a draft.

Writing words that aren’t you’re own takes away the pressure ‘to be inspired’ and frees you up. You’re writing without thinking, then your own words can start to break through. I’m not sure it’s always the rather lofty sounding inspiration Socrates talks about, but it’s a drop of sweat in the ocean. I like how the word ‘winged’ flew in. I did want more of a sense of lightness – and flight, but it wasn’t until a later draft – after re-reading one of my letters from Miriam – that I realised I had to get off the ground somehow. I am now working on it as a letter form poem.

Meanwhile, I found some yellow things.

Two girls from Camberwell Art School set up a pop up gallery in Brixton and made plaster casts of bananas from the market. The skins are real but when you drop one on the floor it clunks in a very unbananalike manner.

Here’s what inspired my first letter-poem to Karen:

Decadence

In Geneva, 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 others

click and send, I lick and bend

white triangle lids, 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 write and revel in the faded;

bananas at the point 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 secret suns

as I imagine hands, the sharp edge

of a butter knife, slitting open.

Fingers touching paper, touching

my fingers where I have touched.

I’ve played with the line-breaks a bit, but it still looks very messy – my early drafts usually do. I’ll be posting subsequent drafts here – perhaps with some help from Karen. The envelope I sent contained only the poem and some yellow pencil shavings. Karen responded with her own letter-poem:

Karen may post her own version too, as I don’t have a scanner.

I’ll end with a picture for Karen:

More to follow…x

Here is the beautiful letter poem Miriam wrote to me. I don’t like to use adjectives like ‘beautiful’ much as they become meaningless in their ubiquity, but it really is exquisite.

Notice how the paper is yellowed. Miriam hand-coloured it.

Writing letters does feel decadent somehow. Not the act of writing itself, the scratch of pen on paper, which feels more like an act of devotion, but the luxury of time and quiet. I know e-readers will allow us to travel light, but every tweet takes me further away from birds, feathers, wings, breeze, currents and pockets of air. Things webby do facilitate photos, spontaneity, sharing and blogging but i-phones, crackberries et al are also talismans of fear. Twitching, or compulsive clicking, needs firm management. I’ll be fine once I get some time in the library (no wi-fi, bliss!).

And here is a picture that precedes my next letter to Miriam..

"I will push my nail/into her neck and make/a lovely necklace out of her green bones" from Alice Oswald's poem Daisy.

On Christmas day, I unwrapped a parcel from Karen. Inside was a beautiful blue bird card and a handmade canvas bag decorated with a lino print of a first class stamp:

The bag was a perfect gift, not just because it relates to our letter-writing, but because on December 31st, I boarded a one-way (for now) flight to Geneva, Switzerland, sporting my new, uber-British bag. So, Karen and I now have an international correspondence (hence the Swiss stamps).

In Geneva, apartment buildings have a row of letter-boxes, each one with the name of the person living there on a tiny gold plaque. I don’t have a plaque, but I’ve managed to tack my name onto my box with a pink post-it note. I’ve heard that if your name isn’t there, you don’t get your mail.

Karen's Christmas Card

A bird theme has crept up on Karen and me through our letters. First in the cards Karen sent me, then in the book I gave her for Christmas (which I chose before I knew she wanted to write around them). Birds are on Swiss stamps and everywhere in the city: sparrows and pigeons pecking breadcrumbs from snow, swans taking flight over the lake, ducks burying their heads in their feathers to keep warm on the water. Last week I even saw a duck with an orange mohawk. A bit like this one:

As Karen says below, I’m interested in ‘flight’ as a theme. Karen’s post prompted me to do some brainstorming around what I mean by ‘flight’ and what makes me drawn to it. Here’s the flight-thought page from my notebook:

I’ve realised the main reason it appeals to me is because of my grandfather, who died in 2004. He was from East Germany and arrived in the UK as prisoner of war at the age of about 19. It’s difficult to write about him, either in poems or (perhaps especially) on a blog, as he was such a private person. But his biggest passion was flying gliders. He even met my grandmother (an au-pair girl from Sweden) on the airfield outside Cambridge. Two months to the day before he died, he was up in the air.

My grandfather only took me gliding once. I must have been about 13. The glider had two cockpits, one at the front, where the student works the plane, and one at the back for the instructor, who has the same controls as the student and can see what they’re doing. So with him as my guide, I flew a glider 2000 feet above Cambridge. I remember it being very peaceful up there – after take-off, you’re literally catching the clouds. It was a beautifully clear day and we could see all of the city and surrounding villages.

I don’t know where these thoughts will take me, but I’ll keep sending letters…

Here are two of the cards Miriam has sent me since we started our correspondence.

Some birds have all the talent. Take the Mockingbird, for example. Mimic, composer, arranger, vocalist, clown, he still finds time to devote to his family." Charles Harper's Birds & Words

Both are lino cuts Miriam made herself. She sent three, but although it’s not lost, I can’t lay my hands on the third right now. It was so exciting receiving them. There’s something quite magical about the wood/lino cut as a form. Bare branches become barer. The tree’s limbs more clear. The prospect of news. Letter writing is, I realise, inherently intimate.

Over the holidays I’ve found making things to be very calming. Folding a sheet of A4 was an antidote to the stresses of the season. I created several little origami books of a single poem called An Aviary of Small Birds. The petals you can see in the picture are from bouquets of flowers I dried over the summer and I used these as a backdrop on the paper for the book.

Birds have become something of a presiding spirit in my correspondence with Miriam, as well as a motif within my new work. Now of course they pop up everywhere. We went to Liverpool for Christmas. The city is represented by a mythic Liver Bird, a cormorant-eagle cross.

I didn't write much in Liverpool except on the back of an envelope. The phrase 'foghorns wake me at wren o'clock' has lodged in my head. A starting point.

Something to play with:

Boxing Day and I wake at wren o’clock to the sound of foghorns so deep and loud I think they’re a mobile phone on vibrate. I imagine giant sea lions bellowing across briny mist in  baritones. The foghorns are grief and they miss me….

In her latest letter Miriam says she is more interested in flight than in birds. This made me think about whether I am interested in birds that cannot fly. For Christmas she sent me a beautiful book: Charles Harper’s Birds & Words.

Flightless birds include the Great Auk that Harper says ‘swam like a fish, walked like a penguin and flew like a stone’ who was hunted to extinction for oil and feathers, as was the Labrador Duck, who lost the power of flight during the breeding and moulting season. On Christmas Day we ate goose and in the January sales we bought a new goose down duvet.

I also bought myself a treat: a first edition (in English) of Pablo Neruda’s Art of Birds. Jack’s Schmitt’s translation is sublime. Not that I know it in the original, but there’s such a purity to it I think you can safely say it’s a good one.

OCTOBRINE: The tricolored octobrine/is born, lives, and dies in October:/it has a revolver's blue shape,/feathers descended from mother of pearl,/tail like a celestial sign,/and this bird is fragrant/like the bee's homeland:/it sings seven copper notes:/then seven notes of rain.//And the intense octobrine dies/a blue and natural death.

Octobrine is my favourite poem. It is blue and intense. As high as the foghorns are low. Outside it’s dark now and snow is just starting to fall. I wonder where the parakeets go in this freezing weather?

I suspect that now I am thinking about birds as a subject I’ll have to look away from them to write about them. I think you need to catch a poem out of the corner of your eye. Meanwhile, the snow still falls…

Today I received my first letter from Karen. Since our meeting on Monday I’ve had a strange expecting-post feeling – an excitement. The feeling comes in the morning, but of course the post doesn’t. But when I got home at 11pm, there it was. Karen sent her letter in a beautiful card with a picture of a bird – a symbol for our new correspondance. Here’s a half-light photo:

Inside was a pressed flower: white, with yellow stamens poking out, surrounded by grass-like shoots – like the veins of a leaf without the structure.  I’ll have to ask Karen what kind it is. Opening the envelope was pure delight. A letter holds so many possibilities, so simply.

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about letters this year. I sent and received hundreds of letters as a teenager, partly because I moved from the Scottish Highlands to Devon, leaving my best friends behind. In April this year, as part of the Slow Down London festival, I ran my first Creative Letter Writing Workshop at Foyles bookshop. The idea was to ask ‘What do letters mean now that they’re no longer an essential means of communication?’. For me, the answer to this is exciting, because I don’t know – they can become whatever we want – fragile documents found only in archives and museums, or a living form of writing that opens doors to the unexpected…

This Autumn I ran a series of ‘Snail Mail’ workshops, and received an amazing and certainly unexpected response. All sorts of people have shared stories – memories of opening letters, letter-inheritances from loved ones, the need to receive something physical in times of grief. One participant wrote a letter to her pair of walking boots, another to the science cabinet at his primary school, another to ‘flirtatiousness’. Some of these letters can be seen on my website.

As well as the workshops, I’m keen to explore letters and letter writing in my poetry. So I couldn’t have been happier when Karen invited me to start a creative correspondance. We haven’t imposed any criteria on ourselves – it will be organic and neither of us knows what will happen. I already feel inspired – receiving a carefully pressed flower, smelling faintly of the book it once lived in, has to be the start of something beautiful…

This is where I stop typing, and pick up my pen…

Here is a visual note of an observational walk which many readers might recognise as the path down to the river at Lumb Bank. While I was here I took a lot of notes but felt I didn’t really have anything to work with afterwards.

The overwhelming emotion I felt at the time was frustration. This helped make my notes more literal at first and then veer towards a lot of metaphorical imagery I was less keen on. However, in the end, the landscape filtered through. Being near the water calmed me. The bear I was chasing turned up in a lichen overcoat. The rush of the river hummed like a PC.