How To Keep a Poetry Notebook
In my poetry notebook I have written the following notes:a murder of crows on everyone’s lawn but my own, flashing breasts = 20% off, I met a leprechaun with intense eyes and chiseled face who writes poetry and was named Byron as a child. There are other things to be found. Long confessions of thoughts I don’t want others to know I have. Discussions of lusty dreams or frightful nightmares, heavy with metaphor and symbolism. Quotations from books, poems, songs. Descriptions of people I see and conversations I have overheard. Nothing is too sacred or mundane to be recorded.
Why do I collect so many things between the covers of my poetry notebook? Because I never know what will become the inspiration for a poem and I know, from experience, that too often an inspiration will present itself only to be lost because a pen and paper are not handy. Or worse, I will snatch up a piece of paper or napkin, borrow a pen from a stranger, only to misplace the hastily scratched idea. This is worse only because I was so secure in the knowledge that I had written it down and now it is just as lost as if I had never written anything down.
One time, when I was driving, I got the idea for a poem, the lines fully forming in my mind. I started reciting two lines to my son who was with me asking him to remember those two lines as I kept repeating the next three lines to myself until I could pull over. With my son’s help, I was able to write out the five lines of the poem in the poetry notebook I carried with me for moments like these. Without that poetry notebook, those five lines would probably have been lost in the time it would have taken me to run my errands and return home.
I never know what will inspire a poem, what story I may overhear on the radio, what quote from a movie will stir something inside. I have learned to find poetry everywhere I go and for this reason I try to carry my poetry notebook anywhere I go. In fact, I don’t know anyone who writes poetry regularly who doesn’t carry something in which to record these random thoughts whenever they may occur. It is a discipline well worth developing if you aspire to be a poet.
Unlike writing poetry, when keeping a poetry notebook there are no rules. The poetry notebook has more to do with a personal aesthetic than anything else. You may prefer to have a poetry notebook with lines while another poet likes the freedom of a completely blank page. The cover may be plain or decorative, hard or soft, the binding spiral or made so that the pages lie flat, the individual sheets larger than 8.5” by 11” or smaller. All that matters is you like the way the book feels when you write in it and that it is easy for you to carry around with you. You may even choose to keep a smaller notepad with you for capturing those random moments to be transferred in a larger poetry notebook later. (This is especially useful if you work where you cannot carry your poetry notebook with you.) I only urge you to try to keep something with you at all times so that you won’t resort to writing these snatches of inspiration on slips of paper or napkins which are too easily lost. If you must grab whatever to write in the heat of the moment, make it a point to transfer what you wrote into a more permanent location as soon as possible.
I’ve already noted that in my poetry notebook I am rather promiscuous about what I include. I try not to judge anything for its poetic potential. Rather, I write everything down and trust that later, when I have time to sift through it all, I will find some golden nuggets of ideas to build into a full poem. I have often surprised myself when reading my journals to discover something beautiful buried in pages of whining and cataloguing. When grieving over the murder of a friend, I wrote, "Grief has no explanation. Grief has its own meaning." I knew as I wrote it that someday I would weave these two sentences into a poem but more often than not it is later, sometimes even years later, that I discover something so raw and honest in my journaling that I am compelled to flesh it out into a poem.
If there is a rule for keeping a poetry notebook then it is this: Do not rule anything out. Include everything you can. If you read an article in a magazine or newspaper that you think you can work into a poem, paste it into your poetry notebook. If you see a picture that you think is interesting, slap it in there. But above all else, write your own words constantly and habitually in your poetry notebook. In fact, I want to offer you a challenge which I first discovered in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. She says that she takes a poetry notebook and fills it, cover to cover, in one month’s time. If I remember correctly, she said she used simple spiral poetry notebooks and made it a point to fill the pages with her writing. At the end of the month, she would finish one poetry notebook and on the first of the following month pull a fresh book off the shelf and begin again.
I challenge you to do the same, with only one word of caution. A friend of mine thought this was a great idea and went out to buy herself an inexpensive poetry notebook at the store. She found a cloth bound book with college ruled lines and bought it for this purpose. The pages were the usual 8.5” by 11” but there were over 200 pages in the book which means that, in order for her to fill the book, she would have had to write over 6 pages a day. In addition to this, of the pages had much more narrow margins than a sheet of loose leaf paper and were college ruled. Needless to say, she was unable to reach the goal. Choose a book which has enough room for you to stretch yourself but not so much that you feel overwhelmed nor so small that you fill it up in two weeks. I have tried a variety of styles and some months I have found filling up the book comes easily while other months are harder. But every month, the challenge of filling that poetry notebook forces me to be more observant than I would be otherwise, seeking out possible ideas or simply whining about my life.
If you take me up on this challenge, I would love to know how it goes so feel free to email me. And if the challenge simply does not appeal to you, I still strongly encourage you to carry a poetry notebook with you wherever you go. The world is hungry for new poems and the inspiration is waiting out there to be discovered and remembered in words. All the world needs is a poet who makes these moments into a poem.
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Posted in Education, Literacy - Reading and Writing
