[Guest author note: In addition to being an accomplished and innovative poet, erica kaufman is the Director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking. The institute, which has been offering professional development workshops for teachers and students since its inception in 1982, is built around the primacy of the notebook and pen as instruments of investigation. Even after the institute was forced to go remote by the pandemic, the notebook and pen remained the pillar and ground of the texts and questions that its various workshops pursued. Not surprisingly, erica’s two books of poems INSTANT CLASSIC and POST CLASSIC (both out from Roof Books) emerged out of the forge of her notebooks. I am delighted that erica agreed to be interviewed for this blog!]
AM: When did you begin keeping a notebook as part of your creative process?
ejk: I’ve kept a notebook as part of my creative process for as long as I can remember. I’ve always loved notebooks as an object--there’s something that is just innately appealing about opening a fresh notebook and completing the last line of the last page of a notebook. Not too long ago I was visiting my parents and found a stack of notebooks from elementary school (3rd grade). It was fascinating because I don’t actually remember writing and keeping any sort of journal at that time, but I did. The notebooks were labeled with my name and the year, and filled with poems with the occasional dated prose entry. My elementary school notebooks are hardcover, often from the Looney Tunes store (if there was such a thing in the 1980’s on Staten Island).
AM: What roles have your notebooks/journals played in your creative process over the years?
ejk: I prefer to write by hand. I use notebooks to keep notes, often lists of things I hear or see, strings of words or phrases that I find interesting. I am always writing--it is how I focus my attention, how I digest information I’m taking in, how I learn. I always try to keep separate notebooks for different purposes--one for notes, one for poem drafting, one for job work...But inevitably these categories bleed into each other so I also spend a lot of time recopying materials from one notebook to another. When I draft a poem I almost always do it in a notebook first, and I revise by recopying drafts and seeing how different small changes feel as I try them out. Writing poetry is a very physical process--I need to experience multiple drafts and I need to have all of my notes and versions of a single piece in one place so I can move back and forth between renditions of a poem before settling on what might be the closest to a final one. The notebook is also where I might test out something I’m thinking about through prose that might later become a poem.
AM: What happens when you write in a notebook that doesn’t happen when you type?
ejk: This is a topic that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years--I’ve read articles with titles like “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades” (NY Times), “Handwriting shown to be better for memory than typing” (Big Think), and “Attention, Students, put your laptops away!” (NPR). In short, it seems as though we have scientific proof that typing and writing by hand are actually different cognitive processes that lead to different things happening in the brain. I know that for me, anything I write by hand sticks in my head in a very different way than if I’m typing. I retain or remember anything that I write in a notebook, the same is just not true when I’m typing. Increasingly I’m also aware that I bring a certain anxiety with me to the keyboard--when I’m typing it is as if whatever I’m working on has different stakes attached to it. When I’m ready to type I’m usually on my way to finishing and submitting something (for my job or for my personal work). So, that’s a totally different experience as well. I’m just not a person who really writes on a screen for pleasure. I’ve even tried the ipad with stylus approach where I could write by hand and have that translated to type, but it didn’t or doesn’t feel the same. The notebook is my version of a sandbox or a laboratory. The keyboard is more like the stage or lecture hall.
AM: Would you like your notebook to be read by others, or are they private?
ejk: My notebooks aren’t private, but at the same time, I’m not sure that they would make sense to anyone but me. I have a tendency to create catalogs and lists of phrases and words more than anything else. So the notebooks are full of these dispersed between poem drafts. I suppose there’s a way in which the notebook then becomes a puzzle?
AM: Can you reflect on the experience of seeing the notebooks of a poet whose work you admire?
ejk: When I was in college I had the privilege of taking a workshop with Anselm Berrigan. At that time he was writing “Zero Star Hotel,” and I remember walking with him after class and he showed me what the poem looked like in his notebook. I remember thinking that the stanzas looked like windows, the poem a large building. I also remember that this was a moment that marked a shift in how I thought about my writing practice. I suddenly realized that the “journaling” I’d always done was writing in its own right. I continue to relish (and remember) moments where I notice a poet writing in a notebook because of how it makes their writing process tangible (to me) in a different way.
AM: Why would you encourage someone interested in writing poetry to keep a notebook?
ejk: I think it is essential! I would encourage someone interested in writing anything to keep a notebook and to think of that notebook as a space with no predetermined goals. When I’ve worked with younger writers, there still seems to be a certain idealization of the notebook as a diary, a place to put one’s secrets and gossip. But, really, the notebook, for me at least, is a place to put anything that is done in writing. What is most useful is the discoveries that happen when I look back through all the writing I’ve done along the way. I’m able to find pieces of poems that can then find new homes in other projects. I can also see how my own writing is changing and how I want it to change. Because I do so much of my revision by hand, seeing the earliest drafts of pieces can often remind me of where I began in a project, and can also then guide me back to certain important questions that the work I’ve made might not have answered as of yet. I’ve been working on an epic trilogy for the past decade or so—thus far it includes INSTANT CLASSIC and POST CLASSIC (both out from Roof Books). I knew the project was a trilogy because of what I found in my notebooks.
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