What is Going into the Notebooks

Posted on March 22, 2004 in Poetry Writing

I don’t know what it means. I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately, a few concentrated lines taking the place of the prose that I can turn out page after page. I’ll be reading something — a phrase will startle me — and reach for the brown notebook to hastily put down a few lines. Then, after several days, as I bury them under a mulch of cellulose and forgetfulness, I come back to them, jerk past the weeds and put the half-budded flowers into the computer — not always here, but in another file.

Why did the prose stop? I don’t know. One thinks that one has nothing to say. Then after a long time, you look back and you find that new ideas came out of your head. They came out in one or two sentences.

The trouble, I think, is that we expect monuments and do not revere the cameo pendants nearly enough.