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The computer as a notebook

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I’m not a troublemaker, I swear.

So why, just as I’ve got into blogging about my notebooks, am I inclined to sneak away from writing in a notebook at all? I think I’ll blame it on my artist friend, Sharon Willson-Imamdin, who has just moved to Perth, Australia. She and I have just begun a collaboration modeled on the experiment between poet Philip Gross and photographer Simon Denison (as profiled in Writing in Education, National Association of Writers in Education, issue 49). Sharon and I are sending first drafts by e-mail: me, poetry and Sharon, on the canvas. Her painting informs my writing, and then my poem feeds into her further painting, etc. We’re essentially building a body of work together, via the Internet. It’s an immediate and exciting practice!

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Untitled painting by Sharon Willson-Imamdin

Now in thinking about where to write these collaborative drafts, I wanted a distinct home for them – somewhere special. Given the swift timescale of our work (I’ve been responding to her paintings at the rate of one or two a day) a notebook almost felt too anchored. My poems were going onto the computer within an hour of starting to draft. So, I decided to scribble on pieces of paper out of the recycling pile. How fresh it has felt to not have to choose a notebook! Of course, some people routinely write directly on the computer like it is a type of notebook. I’m pretty certain that writing very early drafts on the screen affects all sorts of aspects of poetry – form is probably fixed too soon, line breaks may be decided on a purely visual basis and further revision could possibly be hampered as the poem does seem to be ‘finished,’ albeit artificially.

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drafting on recycled paper

And what about this that I’m writing right now? This too has an urgency due to the fact that it’s going into WordPress pretty darn quickly. But an unexpected thing has happened. I have intuitively chosen to write these Open Notebook entries in a journal that I had reserved for all things related to a collective that I attend, Malika’s Kitchen. As Karen goes to the Kitchen sessions as well, it seemed natural. So now the Kitchen notebook has morphed into ‘Karen’s’ notebook. Come to think about it, I have also subconsciously created a notebook for meetings with my PhD supervisor, Stephen Knight. That journal is my ‘Stephen’ notebook. I also have a ‘Moniza’ notebook for a seminar with Moniza Alvi and a book for a Tate Modern activity with Pascale Petit. So I’ve got my subject books to categorize my work /study/life writing, and I’ve also got books which delineate for whom the writing is done. It is a shortcut to identifying which notebook I need to grab at the last second as I dash for the train…

How did Doris manage with only five?!


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