Here in Connecticut on this Autumnal Day the magical leaf color popping out all around, I am thinking of compositional states and means of writing. These days I most often write by hand in notebooks. For some time I was a slave to Atoma's mostly B-5, now they are rare and I am either writing Russian exam books (super skinny) using a very thin Russian ballpoint pen. Before that I was a slave to Japanese notebooks of all sorts and remain addicted to tiny back pocket notebooks with a tiny Zebra pen tucked inside. The same type I used for the Pocket Poetry Project.
Writing in notebooks by hand means I then need type up the writing, to digitize it so I can share it. The typing is a different more meditative activity than the writing. The writing is closely tied to the time of composition so the re-reading during the typing up becomes a kind of mediated time travel back over a few months or if the notebook is much older, over years.
The writing is shaped by the notebooks and pens as much as by the place of composition and my state of mind. The pens and paper in play create the physical relationship between my hand and language. The skinny Russian ballpoint pen retracts as I write, retreating from page, requiring an active twisting open to continue to compose. This engagement with the pen, slows and focuses my concentration on the descriptions and language I scribe onto the examination book pages. Because the examination books are bound, stapled together as a complete compact unit, I think of them each as a single project. Where the Atoma notebooks allow pages to come in and out and whole notebooks to refilled with new pages, allowing them to more fluid and porous in their structure. I can and do write many things in these notebooks and comfortably extract out the parts and pieces of most interest for typing up, allowing the rest to remain pages bundled into the cardboard cases of the most recent refill.
