I’m not a troublemaker, I swear.

So why, just as I’ve got into blogging about my notebooks, am I inclined to sneak away from writing in a notebook at all? I think I’ll blame it on my artist friend, Sharon Willson-Imamdin, who has just moved to Perth, Australia. She and I have just begun a collaboration modeled on the experiment between poet Philip Gross and photographer Simon Denison (as profiled in Writing in Education, National Association of Writers in Education, issue 49). Sharon and I are sending first drafts by e-mail: me, poetry and Sharon, on the canvas. Her painting informs my writing, and then my poem feeds into her further painting, etc. We’re essentially building a body of work together, via the Internet. It’s an immediate and exciting practice!

Untitled painting by Sharon Willson-Imamdin

Now in thinking about where to write these collaborative drafts, I wanted a distinct home for them – somewhere special. Given the swift timescale of our work (I’ve been responding to her paintings at the rate of one or two a day) a notebook almost felt too anchored. My poems were going onto the computer within an hour of starting to draft. So, I decided to scribble on pieces of paper out of the recycling pile. How fresh it has felt to not have to choose a notebook! Of course, some people routinely write directly on the computer like it is a type of notebook. I’m pretty certain that writing very early drafts on the screen affects all sorts of aspects of poetry – form is probably fixed too soon, line breaks may be decided on a purely visual basis and further revision could possibly be hampered as the poem does seem to be ‘finished,’ albeit artificially.

drafting on recycled paper

And what about this that I’m writing right now? This too has an urgency due to the fact that it’s going into Wordpress pretty darn quickly. But an unexpected thing has happened. I have intuitively chosen to write these Open Notebook entries in a journal that I had reserved for all things related to a collective that I attend, Malika’s Kitchen. As Karen goes to the Kitchen sessions as well, it seemed natural. So now the Kitchen notebook has morphed into ‘Karen’s’ notebook. Come to think about it, I have also subconsciously created a notebook for meetings with my PhD supervisor, Stephen Knight. That journal is my ‘Stephen’ notebook. I also have a ‘Moniza’ notebook for a seminar with Moniza Alvi and a book for a Tate Modern activity with Pascale Petit. So I’ve got my subject books to categorize my work /study/life writing, and I’ve also got books which delineate for whom the writing is done. It is a shortcut to identifying which notebook I need to grab at the last second as I dash for the train…

How did Doris manage with only five?!

Writers often get notebooks as presents. Since blogging on this site last week I’ve received two! There is a temptation, when you hold a new journal in your hands and flip through its blank, expectant pages, to start to fill it and give it character. (One book I got for Valentine’s Day has a Dennis the Menace cover, inspiring the idea of a nascent genre of the graphic poetry collection….)

For me, the vibe of the cover is an unassailable influence. My academic books are all black, but I’ve reserved a little aquamarine journal for my bedside.

It is a book reserved for experimentation. I’ve recently begun a PhD at Goldsmiths looking at the concept of vatic voice, as developed by American poet Donald Hall. Hall suggests in his essays that taking naps can be a way of keeping poetry fresh by ‘the experience of losing control and entering a world of freedom.’ (1)

I’m not in the enviable position of being able to take a daytime kip; however, I keep this particular notebook by the bed for any late-night, middle-of-the-night, first-thing-in-the-morning scribbling. What lands in the aquamarine book is often fragmented, barely legible, dreamlike sketches of lyric and image.

I love the magical quality of this bedside friend. It contains stuff that is probably closest to my gut – rumblings that stay with me during the day, that make my insides flutter with possibility. If I tried to place this into one of Anna Wulf’s (2) notebooks, it would probably straddle her emotional and writing journals. But that certainly wouldn’t give it justice. It holds the words that are the seeds of poems and, as such, they are private and precious - to categorize them would feel wrong and yet I’ve done just that by giving them their own notebook. But where I often end up cross –fertilizing ideas and drafts in any old notebook to hand (out of circumstance or laziness), I wouldn’t dream of scratching these dreams in the same notebook as, say, lecture or bibliographic notes.

There seems to be a priority of value in a sense - the aquamarine notebook would be my own personal golden notebook, the essence of the real me, and best fit to Doris Lessing’s so-called feminist doctrine, perhaps the truest representation of me as a writer and a woman.

1. From Donald Hall’s Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2003, (pg. 29)

2. The protagonist from Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook.

I am a poet. During an average week I do many things: I teach, I perform, and I fundraise to support my projects. I am a MPhil/PhD student in the Creative Writing course in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths. Of course, I write poetry, and I sometimes experiment with the short story and the novella. I attend peer and mentor workshops and I read a lot. This is on top of being a mother of two young boys and a community volunteer. I am stretched and scattered and love the variety of my life.

Having so many roles, you might think I’m forced by my circumstances to be extra organized, but I’m not. I am, by nature, a relatively neat and ordered person; however, I am loath to tidy and categorize my writing life for fear it will somehow sabotage my creativity. I worry that I run the risk of hemming in my thoughts by neatly filing everything away and destroying the free, organic nature of my imagination.

Last month, I read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Lessing’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, keeps four colored notebooks, one for each part of her life: politics, day-to-day events, emotions and her writing life. This got me thinking about my own practice – could it be contained so neatly? Would keeping distinct notebooks for all my different types of writing – research, free writing, notions, plots, revision, etc. help or hinder me? And the computer – how do I treat that? Is it essentially another type of notebook, or more of a final destination for the handwriting that ‘graduates’ and is destined for public consumption? These are the questions guide me on the start of a practice-based academic career. I’ll get out my notebooks and begin.

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.