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 working on it as a letter form poem and will update on this as it emerges.

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.

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…