In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 275.
When I started collecting weekly notebook entries from my graduate poetry students, I noticed that this writing was more compelling, alive, less “written” than the poems they had been submitting. I was catching them before they deleted the details, rhythms, leaps, tonal shifts, and syntax that can create a sense of intimacy and interiority—presence, surprise, the excitement of discovery—before they revised the quirky particulars that make a reader feel addressed. This is the quality Elizabeth Bishop prized most and found in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert: the feeling of a mind in action. The rhythms of thought.
I’ve long been a keeper of notebooks. I don’t write in my head. I find myself on paper. Writing by hand slows me down, helps me pay attention. Language, sensation, feeling, thought, memory moving through my body, down my arm, out the tip of the pen, onto the page. You write it down; you remember it. And then something alchemical happens: What you record begins to bump up against and interact with what you’ve written in the pages around it.
In the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot calls the mind of the poet “a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” My notebook is a version of my mind, a record of what I’ve seen, thought, heard, dreamt, questioned, or just found interesting. It’s my way of taking the world and transforming it into language. A field of possibility.
Everything goes in there: what I’m reading, quotes, random observations. A talk on Beckett. Some facts about bats. Notes about time or fungi, the three kinds of twilight. Betye Saar’s windows, Joan Mitchell’s paintings, and what a man shouted on West 4th St. I glue in images, record etymologies, jot down words that sound good together: Ubiquitous helicopters. Emotion emulsion. And, of course, (ideally) two to three pages of daily writing.
I never know when I’ll need—or be inspired by—the fact that there are three hundred muscles in the face or that the tears you shed in emotion contain 20 to 25 percent more protein than those you shed chopping onions. A quote from The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous work of Christian mysticism, beside a sentence about walking around CVS with a migraine, and some random things my mother said over the phone begin to suggest, or gradually coalesce into, a poem.
I comb through my notebooks to help me make something out of what I’ve already generated. I pull out lines, passages, whatever strikes me as compelling. What I love about notebooks is that they not only preserve, but also, when you go back, things seem to have slipped from their original contexts and attached to other things. A fact or quotation changes in relation to other observations. The dentist hummed Edelweiss. Birds eat the shells of their hatched eggs. Why didn’t I have a child?
Because I index and cross-reference—which just means I number the pages and note in the back what seems important—I can usually find what I need. Last week I was able to “remember” that a poem with no overt reference to him, was written on the day Stephen Hawking died.
When I’m feeling stuck, I read writers’ notebooks and diaries. I love to watch Virginia Woolf find new ways of writing as she “loosens the ligaments.” It’s not only what she writes, but how, that leads her to discover new forms, to find her way into Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. Whitman transformed what he jotted in his many handmade notebooks—cinematic catalogues of his Broadway jaunts, descriptions of Egyptian hieroglyphics, sudden cries of the heart (“The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious”)— into his greatest poems.
“My brain has the stomach of a seagull eating beach trash,” says notebook keeper Brenda Hillman, whose poems retain the thrill of process and discovery.
I ask my students to keep their notebooks on paper. To write every day. I tell them Audre Lorde, my first poetry teacher, told us many of the poems in The Black Unicorn (Norton, 1978) were lifted whole out of her notebook. That some of these entries were from times she’d pulled to the side of the road and written in a rage in her car. I suggest my students change it up, write at different times, in different places: subway, waiting room, indoors, outdoors. Different pens, pencils. Sit at the desk, on the floor, in a chair, with your cat, in silence, with music. And just write.
After a few weeks I ask them to go back though their notebooks, to make something by getting quiet and listening to what fragments and entries suggest as they hold them side by side. This next part, to read in a receptive state, with hovering attention, demands curiosity, negative capability, a willingness to play. You need to allow for uncertainty, let the unconscious choose what belongs. You have what you’ve recorded. Now, as you honor the energy and strangeness of your notes, what can you make out of them?
Donna Masini’s latest book of poems, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?, was published by W. W. Norton in May. She lives in New York and is a professor of English at Hunter College.
image credit: Hasnain Sajid Hakeem