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’.

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.

‘… 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…

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’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

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…