Notebook #1: Strong words

Some notes on notemaking; disappearing elections

Van Gogh, “The Yellow Books”

Ed: several readers have pointed out that the extracts below were originally full of typos. This is always the risk with doing anything ‘by hand’, but especially a risk when you have your hands full and I can only apologise. I always intended to do another proof…

Life and work have both been busy and haven’t lent themselves to writing anything much recently. At least, that’s what I tell myself. And it’s true. But it’s also true that writing is a lot easier when you stop thinking of it as a process with an end point and concentrate on getting words on the page. I describe this blog as a ‘poetry notebook’ but I rarely use it like a notebook - that is as an ad-hoc collection of quotes, piecemeal thoughts or even drawings. I try and often fail to write the same kind of finished articles that I do for magazines and newspapers, if on a smaller scale. Funny, that.

Funny, and especially funny given that if I was in the business of issuing broad-brush statements about anything my first one would be: writing is the business of making notes. For an author or a poet, this means notes about the world, or other people, or whatever’s going on in their own heads or ideally some combination of the three. This is superficially easy - there is no entrance exam, no special tools or knowledge required - and in practice very hard. For the critic or the essayist, this means making notes about other peoples’ writing. This is superficially hard (I sometimes read or hear very good creative writers say that they couldn’t possibly do it, and in any case it reminds most normal people of school) and in practice very easy: all you have to do is copy out what someone else has written and then comment on it. Unlike thoughts or birds or traffic, words that are already on the page stay still. Half the job is done for you.

It gets much harder if you forget the first step, which I always do. I’m more convinced than ever that every good essay or review begins as a series of extracts, yet every time I write one I try end up trapped in a thicket of my own words, one I can only cut myself out from by remembering to go back to the text.

I thought about this a lot, for obvious reasons, while I was writing about Roly Allen’s excellent history of the notebook for the (excellent) summer issue of The London Magazine. One of the lessons in the book, which perhaps should be obvious but is worth repeating endlessly, is that the value of making notes isn’t simply what you draw together but the act of drawing. For instance: when you quote a passage by hand, or copy something from sight, something inside you changes - in the case of sketching, your brain literally changes if you practice for long enough. In the case of words, you remember them better.

In the review I complain about social media and the way in which the temptation to share pictures of whatever we’re reading with other people turns us into communication nodes, at the expense of these more transformative experiences. Really this is an argument with myself. If I was worried about what I was doing, I could delete my accounts. But then, so much of what has become my ‘literary life’ takes place online. It is not so easy to give up.

Perhaps in any case there is a spectrum. It would be interesting to know whether typing a passage out on a keyboard has a similar but reduced effect to writing it out by hand. The following quotes are all typed out from the anthology Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2000), edited by W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis. The books is a collection of ‘short statements by poets about poetry’, from Yeats through to the almost-present, some mined from elsewhere, some commissioned for the first time. I really recommend it. Perhaps they should do a sequel. The few similar books I’ve seen reviewed recently have been focussed on writing advice - handbooks for people who want to ‘be a poet’ - which isn’t the same thing. Interestingly, the statements which spoke most or felt most important to me were from the sixties.

I’ve called this Notebook #1 because it’s the first attempt to do something more informal every now and then, sharing what I’ve been reading or noticing. We’ll see how it goes. We can always pretend it never happened.

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I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our time is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more “in their stride” - hides grow thicker. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

Denise Levertov

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It is better to have the child in the chimney-corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than to have the poem a puzzle to which that meaning is the only key. Still, complicated subjects make complicated poems, and some of the best poems can move only the best readers; this is one more question of curves of normal distribution. I have tried to make my poems plain, and most of them are plain enough; but I wish that they were more difficult because I had known more.

Randall Jarrell

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The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts.

But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Sylvia Plath

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What poetry musn’t do is talk to itself. Nothing is easier than to get a gathering of poets to extol the value and insight of poetry and to lament its marginalisation. Apart from the warm glow that this confers, it doesn’t achieve very much. A convention of beer-drinkers or foxhunters would claim as much. But the danger of introversion is particularly acute in the case of poetry, a verbal art which uses as its medium the terms that people employ in all their acts of communication. The poet borrows the currency of general exchange and must spend it productively; otherwise the loan is abused. The users of the language as a whole are entitled to an opinion on how it is used in poetry. As it happens, despite a lot of complaining by poets about the slighting of poetry, people in general are curiously respectful of it: more than it deserves, I often think. If someone makes out they are a poet, then the have to answer to the responsibilities as well as claiming the considerable privileges and kudos. The fact is that poetry manages to maintain its social status without making much social return.

Bernard O’Donoghue

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I remind myself that when I fell in love with reading and writing and listening to poetry I was not historically aware, I was flesh and bone and blood. I did not write as a reader nor did I read as a writer until much later in my reading and writing life. But history saved me even as it imprisoned me for a while. History gave me direction whereas before I became conscious of its pushes and pulls I was at the mercy of my impulses (most of them grounded in the romantic tradition). When I discovered that I was black in Britain and at the mercy of a hundred thousand negative images of blackness that I had to counter, an historical imagination gave me a purpose. If history were an engine for the imagination then coupled to it were two cars or twin gifts, the first was the wider community of black people and the second the loose fraternity of poetry (at least as a reading experience).

Fred D’Aguiar

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A poem is a machine for remembering itself.

Don Paterson

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As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and honest exploration of them become sancturaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualisation of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me”. We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transport them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Audre Lorde

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There is an election tomorrow in the UK. There are important elections going on, or imminent, in several places. This one has been very strange to witness. It is the second election now that I have barely noticed in person. You see a lot online: Twitter is full of breathless talk about opinion polls and I foolishly subjected myself to at least some of at least one of the TV ‘debates’. But the campaign barely seems to be making an impression on the place I live, beyond a few flyers through the door. There’s something eerie about this.

I grew up in small-town, semi-rural Hampshire. My abiding memory of elections, there (besides crushing disappointiment) are visual: posters on stakes driven into verges, on gates into fields, in gardens. You would look out for them as if the numbers would give a a sense for how things were going for each party, or what kind of people were living where. Our constituency was a choice between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats and having already decided by then that I was left wing I always looked out for the Lib Dem signs, almost as a comfort. They were also, notably, diamond shaped.

That constituency was a marginal one and it might be again on Thursday. In London, I have only ever lived in safe Labour seats. I assume that’s why there is no physical evidence: it’s not worth the bother. I have seen one or two small posters in windows, but no signs, no billboards and no one coming round door to door asking for votes (yet). Equally, it might also be a sign of disillusionment, or the migration of life online. Either way it feels vaguely unreal. I don’t like it. An important part of democracy is being able to see it happen.