In one of his notebooks, Pablo Picasso wrote “je suis le cahier” (I am the notebook), which conveys the important role that keeping notebooks/sketchbooks played in his creative process. Picasso is hardly alone. From Leonard da Vinci’s fifty notebooks to the those of Allen Ginsberg, the keeping of notebooks has been an integral part of the creative act for many writers and artists. The fact that notebooks are handwritten, that they capture process, and that they are closest temporally to the moment of inspiration grants them a privileged place in the practices and legacies of writers. No wonder scholars pore over the notebooks of poets for insights into the mystery of their works. What’s also interesting is how some poets, such as Philip Larkin, attempt to destroy their notebooks, whereas others, like Ginsberg, sell them for considerable sums of money.
As an undergraduate at Bard College in the mid-to-late 1990s, I had the great fortunate of taking a poetry workshop with John Ashbery during my sophomore year. We became friendly afterward and I was invited over to his home in Hudson, New York for lunch. Sitting in his upstairs study, I saw a spiral notebook of continuous prose propped up on a stand next to an antiquated computer. I asked about the notebook and he shared a bit about his process. The notebook in question would become his book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999), inspired by the paintings and 15,000-page fantasy novel of the eccentric Chicago-based artist, loner, and custodian Henry Darger (1892-1973). Ashbery explained that for this poem he had written everything in penciled prose first. There were no line or stanza breaks and minimal punctuation. Stream-of-conscious. Line and stanza breaks were determined later on as he typed the language into a word file.
That visit to Ashbery’s home precipitated my interest in seeking out (and possibly handling) the journals and notebooks of many of my favorite poets, including Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, and Walt Whitman, the title of whose magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, literally means “pages of jottings,” precisely the sort of impressionistic writing that poets scribble into their notebooks. Whitman, as a poet of human forms and capacities, saw his work as a living organic body that was midwifed into existence through notebooks in which he discovered the possibilities of the long line and the multitudinous voice of the American self.
If the philosopher John Dewey was correct by suggesting that all language is social, the poet’s notebook captures the conversations we have with ourselves before we turn and share our thoughts and feelings with others. Notebooks enable an inner life, and one that’s less governed by the demands of the publication market or laws of genre. In the notebook, one’s creative self can incubate. For young writers in particular, the proliferation of technology and social media has turned the notebook into an endangered species.
The blog entries posted over the coming days will contain a series of interviews and reflections that celebrate the poet’s notebook shared by Erica Kaufman, Carley Moore, Sam Truitt, and the artist Jean Holabird. I hope you enjoy!
Wonderful post! The info on JA & "Girls on the Run" alone is worth the price of admission. Fascinated as I am by the relation of notebooks to finished works, I believe the notebook as such is a very attractive form or structure.
Posted by: David Lehman | July 26, 2021 at 03:34 PM