Neeli Cherkovsky talks about the magic of composing poetry on the computer. He writes ideas and sketches in notebooks but never poems. Poems he writes only on the computer.
I wrote through the nineties and all the way through the oughts on a computer. Sometimes even on something called a Palm Pilot which was about the size of an iPhone but had this amazing fold out keyboard. Then something changed. I became more and more interested in writing on paper, in notebooks and increasingly very specific types of notebooks. Japanese notebooks for a long time were my go to place to write. Then Belgian Atomo notebooks with their solid spirals and special binding letting the pages be taken out and new blank pages put in. I am again back to Japanese notebooks (or at least those from Japanese stores as some are actually made in Vietnam).
I am not sure exactly what drove me back to paper and away from the computer. It may have been a shrinking down of the scope of my writing. A return to more poetry less fiction and performance pulling me closer to the page. It could have been the intense digitization of my life (along with everyone else's). But the notebooks are a pleasure and a problem. The writing stays in the notebooks for a long long time. A problem I have talked about briefly before.
I've been asking myself recently what it is I am interested in. Obsessed with. And by extension how to engage with that interest/obsession. Ironically what I am most interested in is Performance. Something that I gave up formally a long long time ago but something that inhabits my every day and very being quite intensely.
I perform constantly. Usually short improvised pieces riffing off a phrase or bit of language that infect the place, situation or my mind. These small performances are impossible for me to stop. The happen almost out of control and with some risk or danger. I have no idea what is coming next until they are done.
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