One of my favourite things about letters is envelopes. I recently received a very exciting one from Karen:

On the back

1) Write a poem where each line begins with a word beginning with ‘O’

2) Write a poem where each line ends with a word ending in ‘O’

3) Write a 10 line poem that takes place at night

4) Write a haiku before opening this letter that anticipates its contents

5) Write a haiku after opening this letter than summarises its contents

It took a whole morning and a large dose of self-restraint to complete the tasks before opening Karen’s letter. Here’s the haiku I wrote just before opening it, anticipating its contents:

Before

One revolution,
a bird, swimming or flying.
Winter, a secret.

When I opened it, I discovered where all the ‘O’s came from:

This wise, old gentleman is neither swimming nor flying.

Our correspondence helps me to play, to not take writing too seriously and to worry less about whether what I write is ‘good’. Here are two of the poems from Karen’s tasks, just for fun:

1) Write a poem where each line begins with a word beginning with ‘O’

Bromo Erupting

On every slope and furrow, it settles,
Ominous thick black ash.
Only the shoots of the green peeking
Onions survive, their smell pressing
Over the landscape, the bikers, the peeling blue vans.
Only the billowing mountain-cloud
Owns its own choices
Out in the flat, marbled lands.
Omniscient
Opulent
Older than ancestors
Open now
Ogled at
Omen.

I recently visited Java, Indonesia, where I stood in front of an erupting Mount Bromo. See my last post.

The word that sparked this poem was actually ‘Onions’. The smell crept into everything.

3) Write a 10 line poem that takes place at night

Last year, I wrote a letter to Karen about the night market in Malacca, Malaysia. This task prompted me to write it into a poem:

Night Market, Malacca

Who will buy the latest suction gadget
from Korea, the magic wallet with no seams
or a potato swirled to a tornado
on a stick? A custard tart, a sweet green blob
of stickiness, a toy Toyota, six pairs
of pink and yellow earrings shaped like keys.
The night breaks out in fairy lights and neon,
boom boxes and kids. Who will try the potion
concocted by the kung fu master
who splits the shells of coconuts with just one finger?

Potato Tornado

I don’t know if Karen has received these poems yet, but she is offline on retreat, so hopefully she will only discover them in the post…

Travel photos by Hristo

A letter for Karen will be dropped into the silver Singaporean postbox later today, but I too have an un-posted postcard.

I just came back from nine days in Java, Indonesia, where I was very pleased with myself for buying stamps at the post office in Yogyakarta, only to arrive at the edge of an erupting Mount Bromo to find no postcards. I suspect I might have found one if the mist hadn’t been so thick, the windows hadn’t rattled and the trembling of the earth hadn’t made me unsteady on my feet.

So in reply, here is my postcard to Karen, complete with stamps:

5.30am, the mist began to clear.

With much love x

A portion of it may even arrive in the post!

It’s been many months since Karen and I blogged about our letters, but offline, our correspondence is alive and in the post. We’ve now been writing to each other for over a year, and these letters, with their free-flow of thoughts, pictures, poems, birds and colourful envelopes have become an essential part of my writing process and my life.

It’s been a year of new places and a whole assortment of post boxes…

I started the year in Geneva, with its famous yellow postboxes

Then back to London, where our letters become more local

... And finally to Singapore, where some colourful postboxes can be found, as well as plain silver ones.

On a trip to Melaka in Malaysia, I also discovered these beauties:

Letterbox at no. 89

Chinese letterbox

Living so far from home, I’ve been surprised to find that my best news from the UK comes by post. Skype, email and facebook would be hard to live without, but they rarely include as much of another person as an eight-page letter. When I’m writing my letters, I feel as if I’m spending some time with Karen, sharing a little piece of my life with her.

Karen and I have noticed that when we were blogging about our letter writing and how it fed into our writing process, our correspondence had a stronger visual element. We sent each other more pictures, collected photographs for the blog of things we were writing about and developed ideas for poems through images as well as words. We’ve decided to try bringing our correspondence back online, to see what happens.

I’ll sign off with some large Indian civets, who often accompany my letters…

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…

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.

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 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

Margaret Atwood wrote a very interesting article about birds in Saturday’s Guardian. Interesting but also alarming. It is full of  scary statistics and facts.

Here are a few statistics. In the United States, power lines kill 130 to 174 million birds a year – many of them raptors such as hawks, or waterfowl, whose large wingspans can touch two hot wires at a time, resulting in electrocution, or who smash into the thin power lines without seeing them (think piano wire). Cars and trucks collide with and kill between 60 and 80 million annually in the US, and tall buildings – especially those that leave their lights on all night – are a major hazard for migrating birds, leading to between a hundred million and a billion bird deaths annually. Add in lighted communication towers, which also kill large numbers of bats, and can account for as many as 30,000 bird deaths each on a bad night – thus 40 to 50 million deaths a year, and due to double as more towers are built. Agricultural pesticides directly kill 67 million birds per year, with many more deaths resulting from accumulated toxins that converge at the top of the food chain, and from starvation as the usual food of insectivores disappears. Cats polish off approximately 39 million birds in the state of Wisconsin alone; multiply that by the number of states in America, and then do the calculations for the rest of the world: the numbers are astronomical.

Here is a link. I touch on this in my latest letter to Miriam…more on that soon.