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.

My last entry on Open Notebooks was on 30 July when I was waiting to give birth. In between then and now the worst thing that has ever happened to me happened: after a healthy pregnancy of 41 weeks I went in to a long labour that lasted for nearly five days all in all. It wasn’t until the morning of 7 August that the midwives picked up an irregularity in the baby’s heartbeat and I was rushed in to theatre for an emergency Caesarian. Unfortunately, the surgery was unsuccessful and after a long fight for life, our son Otto’s heart and lungs gave out. He was a first and a much longed-for child.

The rest of August is a blur of shock and grief. I think the body literally puts you into physical shock so you can cope with the spiritual and emotional turmoil. I didn’t know whether I would write or not, but as it turned out, it felt quite natural to open my notebook, start a journal and write poems about the experience.

A Parcel from Helen

The next question was whether I would share that process here. In many ways it was something I wanted to do: surely this was the point of Open Notebooks? The death itself had been necessarily public: pregnancy is a time of expectation and many of the physical changes in the body are obvious. Friends, family and colleagues await news. Yet the intensity and depth of grief felt inherently private. My Twitter, Facebook, online blogging and browsing were all abruptly halted. Even connecting to the internet to check email was something I was slow to do. I needed the quiet of trees and birds, to look at the sea not the screen.

The Beach at Cassis

A huge wave of support washed in from everyone we knew. The buzzer would sound and packages arrived. The parcels, notes of condolence, cards and flowers were a comfort, and something I came to enjoy, despite their provenance.

Abiye Sends Me 'The Poet Reclining' and Some Shades. There's a beautiful synchronicity to this package's arrival. All week I'd been working on a poem - in my mind was a long walk in the Luberon earlier in the summer I wanted to compare to a painting by Chagall, with a horse, green fields and a bruised-looking sky. There was something very particular about the colours and the atmosphere I wanted to catch but I couldn't quite conjure up the image. Abiye's gift came with a postcard of Chagall's The Poet Reclining - the very same image.

The Shades Were Hot Too

I began also to venture back online.  One day I clicked through to fellow poet Miriam Nash’s blog post about her creative letter writing workshops which explore the letter as a form. I loved this idea. I left a comment and also started to think about how I’d enjoyed the snail mail letters I’d received and how this experience related to the idea behind Open Notebooks.

With this in mind, Miriam and I met earlier this week and she’s going to be guest blogging on the site with me over the next few weeks.

Notebooks at the Ready

We’ll be sending each other snail mail letters, responding to the contents and using the correspondence to generate poems.

The Book of Stamps

I gave Miriam a book of stamps. She seemed very pleased with them. Now I need to write my first letter…