This is my first edit of ‘Decadence’. I can almost see the next draft in my mind, so I’m posting this version quickly before it disappears into the waste paper bin - or, more realistically, the stack of lonely files at the back of my hard drive.

I begin all my poems by hand, and I pretty much have to hide my laptop from myself until I’m ready to edit. I’m far too eager to type up a new poem before it’s fully formed and start editing it before it’s even learned to crawl. Then the poem ends up with one leg on the ceiling and the other in the fridge. Not a good look. A keyboard and screen bring out the critic in me. Pen and paper make me more lenient and I can allow myself to write freely. But my laptop is essential when it comes to editing. Here’s the draft:

DECADENCE
Geneva, January 2010

The city’s 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 other click and send
I lick and bend brown envelopes,

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 revel in the faded; bananas
at the point of 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 evening suns

as I imagine hands,
the sharp edge of a butter knife,

fingers touching paper,
touching my fingers where I have touched.

And because editing can sometimes lack colour, here’s some yellow I discovered, looking through old photos:

Spring gorse in Findhorn Village, Scotland

Singaporean postbox

The poem hasn’t changed dramatically yet. I’ve played around with the form and put it in couplets (it seems to fit nicely), I’ve tightened up some lines and moved ‘Geneva’ to the subtitle to try and avoid a clunky first line. One subtle change was suggested by Raymond Antrobus - ‘white triangle lids’ has become ‘brown envelopes’. Concrete and definitely better. And how did Raymond come to have a hand in editing this poem? We’re both members of the Vineyard.

The Vineyard is an international, online community of poets, led by Jacob Sam-La Rose. Emerging and established poets share their work, give and receive feedback and discuss anything and everything to do with poetry. Our styles and methods are diverse, but we all share a commitment to working our craft, hard. The ‘yard (as we usually call is) is an essential part of my writing process. If a poem stays in my notebook or on my computer, it usually never makes it out of the house. Sharing my work on the ‘yard gives me the confidence to change it, improve it and eventually share it publicly. Here, you’re getting a peak into the early life of a poem. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t call this ‘ready’.

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.

The post has been sneaky. On Thursday I opened my letterbox to find one of my letters to Karen returned by Monsieur La Poste - the address label must have peeled off in the cold interior of the postbox. On the same day, my forward-mail from London arrived, including a card sent by Karen on 17th December… part of our correspondence making a late entrance. In some ways this is apt. Because it takes a while for our letters to travel from Geneva to London and back, they often overlap - I’m not always sure which letter Karen is responding to, but I like the guessing, the calculating, the chance arrivals…

Here is a post-van I caught speeding away in the Old Town:

I don’t think letter writing is dying, but escaping, changing into something else, speeding down the road in a yellow van. I wrote a lot of letters this week, including one to my Godmother, who I had lost contact with for about seven years, and who found me again through my blog. We used to keep a ‘letter book’ - a small book we sent between the UK and the US, writing new entries to each other over time. It was a bit like a secret blog between two people, or a shared notebook.

My 'letter-workshop' from my week of letters

Before I read Karen’s ‘Wing’ on the blog, I received it on the back on a yellow bird. I do think sending a poem in a letter can give it the secrecy to breathe and come alive as Karen quotes below. Secrecy brings excitement, an impulse to continue or take the poem elsewhere. It makes it more like a curious object, that can be looked at from several angles and appear different. It moves it outside of the person who wrote it.

The 'Wing' I received

The yellow messenger

Is Karen is one step ahead of this blog post? Has she received my latest letter? Partners in crime La Poste and Royal Mail keep this a secret…

‘… 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…

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.

Today I nipped out for a walk, and what should be waiting in the pink post-it marked letter box, but an envelope that could only be from Karen! I always know, because she writes little messages on the backs of her envelopes. This one said:

I’m looking forward to it…

Although Karen and I have known each other for a while, I feel I know her best through our letters, each time a little more. Letters are intimate. Like Karen said in hers, once you write something it can’t be deleted. You have to start again or let it stay, even if it just popped out of your pen for no apparent reason. In a way, letters are a form of free-write, but addressed to someone. New ideas come out from nowhere, sneak round the edges of the page.

In her letter, Karen wrote about finding a mouth for a three-tiered snowman on Christmas Eve. This made me think of Herbert, the snowman I helped build in the Parc des Bastions, here in Geneva. He was an explorer snowman, with an ‘I’m a little tea-pot’ posture. Here he is, looking proud of himself:

Herbert, freshly built

The next day I went back to see if he was still there. He was, but he looked pretty disheveled:

'He'd obviously been out on the town'

These sketches are from my smaller notebook, which I take with me whenever I go out. I’m always collecting little snippets of things (sights, sounds), often saving them for letters to Karen. Recently, when I write notes, I even feel like I’m writing ‘to’ Karen in my notebook. It’s something about getting into the habit of writing to her - when I write freely, my hand/brain must have her in mind. This is a sketch of the cat on the card Karen sent me, and the notes that seemed to write themselves to her…

Sketch of Rousseau's cat

Karen and I both plan to write some poems from our correspondence, but, she says in her letter, it’s still early days and it’ll happen. I like the idea of giving our poems time to arrive, like our letters… Without saying much more, here’s a hint of the next thing destined for Karen’s mailbox:

A bientot x

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…