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.

Yemisi Blake and I met at the South Bank to talk about the next phase of his guest blogging.

Yem shows me his notebook. We discover that we both like hands and feet.

We talked about how some of the ideas behind ON are informing the way he notebooks. The H00die Project is looking great and we’ll showcase more of it here in the coming months.

We also decided to write a collaborative piece together on Open Notebooks. I suggested a renga and Yem liked the idea. This is a collaborative Japanese form, that utilises the 5-7-5 syllabic 3-line format of the Haiku, followed by a 7, 7 syllable 2-line verse that shifts the poem on. Check this site for more on renga.

Now here’s the EXCITING bit. Yem is off on a train trip round India with 350 creative young entrepreneurs.

Yem's Route Round India

So the Renga will document his travels with a post from each of the 13 stops. We’ll be moving from the season to season, hemisphere to hemisphere as I respond from the snow-driven streets of Blighty, incorporating the moon, a flower, love – as the renga form dictates – and subverting it by posting ‘haiku photos’ to complement each iteration.

I was inspired to write a Hai Bun recently: this is a short piece of prose/prose poetry followed by a haiku. The haiku’s relation to the text is non-linear, so it addresses the underlying heart/energy of the poem rather than the narrative. I’ll be writing some Hai Bun here – but replacing the closing haiku with a photograph that performs the same function. This is how we’ll aim to use the photographs in the renga.

Yem will text/email me his verses and images from India and I’ll upload them here. I get to start, as I invited Yem to take part in the renga. I’ll do that in a separate post so the piece builds.

I can’t wait. I’m off to start the first installment.

Recently I’ve been using photographs to develop ideas around writing. Earlier this year, I bought a Nikon D40. Much to the annoyance of my mates, I’ve been taking it everywhere. I’m still in that trigger happy honey moon period.

In April I started to take pictures of friends wearing hoodies. I found the pictures released ideas, questions and inspirations.

This is a picture of my friend Lydia. Not realising how zoomed in I was, I took a close up image of the enormous hoodie she was wearing. And then by total fluke, I got this image of a bus whizzing past as her head was turned to the side.

Again, the image below was an accident and just happened to come out with the foreground out of focus.

This got me thinking about our perceptions of what we see as ‘hoodies’. When we use that word, are we loading it with other understandings of delinquent youth, young people, ASBOs, masking and misbehavior? By ‘zooming’ in on the individuals that we view as disruptive, are we blurring our vision to the societal surroundings that can sometimes create that behaviour.

It’s unlikely that these photos will inspire writing about a girl in a hoodie or a bus passing. What they do give me is colour, concept and movement, foreground and background. All things that I can use when putting pen to paper.

We start from doodles and sketches. And sometimes we make real plans, and sometimes we just start building. Building is at the heart of the experience.
Gever Tully

Like many writers, when starting the first line of a poem, I’m already thinking about what the last line will be. Too often I try to rush to the message, the meaning, the cause of the poem. Sometimes this works, but most times it causes a kind of ‘tear my hair out’ frustration. Luckily, certain ideas make it known very early that you’re in for the long stretch.

Last year, I developed a keen interest (or obsession) for hoodies. The hoodie not only as clothing but as a political term (hug a hoodie), a cultural dress (hip-hop hoods up), but also as a noun and adjective (those damn hoodies stole my phone!).

Slowly my interest has morphed into artistic/ sociological research that will eventually become some kind of ‘piece’. (a lovely ambiguous term). During my time as a guest booker on Open Notebooks, I’ll be sharing my process of building this idea. I’ll also be writing a new poem for the Open Notebooks project.

Big shout out to Karen for starting inviting me to take part!