Malcolm Davidson, of the poetics blog Eeksy Peeksy and the poetry blog Tram Spark, has sent out a survey to a number of poets (and perhaps others), asking how they write, which for me raises up a memory of a workshop I taught at Naropa maybe nine years ago. On the first day of the workshop, I asked participants to discuss how they wrote. As they went around the room, most of what I heard was abstractions about thematic concerns. Then I asked to fill out some 4x6 cards with the following information about how they wrote – was it by hand, pen or pencil, by typewriter or computer? What kind of paper did they use? Did they tend to write morning or night? Did they have a special place where they wrote? If so, where? Did they have music on as they wrote? Could they write with other people in the room? Could they/did they write in public places? Very much the same sort of questions that Malcolm is asking. Then I explained to them that this week we would be writing in ways that systematically altered each of those terms. If they wrote out doors – one, as I recall, only wrote on the rooftop of his building – they should do it inside. If they wrote by hand, they should try a typewriter or computer. And so forth. A couple of students dropped the workshop almost instantly, but on the second day the room was even more crowded as word of this assignment had filtered to the other students there.

 

I had gotten the idea for this from an interview Robert Creeley had given in which he suggested that a way out a writer’s block was to simply change the physical terms of the writing – he suggested changing the size of the paper one used. It reminded me of a time when I had been a student at San Francisco State in the 1960s while living in Berkeley (a long commute by the F bus & N Judah – this was pre-BART – that taught me how to read & write on buses) when I had a terrible accident. I had been cleaning my desk at home and had picked up my typewriter – literally my very first purchase from my very first job post high school – when I dropped it & it broke into literally a thousand pieces. It took me at least a month, maybe two, to be able to afford a new typewriter, and during that time I had had to change the condition of my writing.

 

Up to that point, I had written almost exclusively on the typewriter since I was 16 (I was now about 22) & almost always at night, at the end of the day, when I was filled with the language & energy of whatever had been happening in my life. Now I was thrown back on writing by hand – my penmanship is almost illegible even to me – and I picked up some yellow legal sized tablets at a Berkeley office store – I was already using them to take notes for classes – and began to write somewhat on the long commute out to SF State each day. Just writing in the daytime – I was reading Robert Duncan’s Roots and Branches that year & had already read enough Phil Whalen to know that poets did indeed write “on the bus” so I may have been attracted to the romance of that as well – just doing this as I sat & looked out the window & felt the rhythms of the machinery at work was a new & eye-opening experience.

 

When I got my new typewriter, I began typing up my manuscripts from the intervening weeks and was amazed to discover that my typical poem, when typed, almost perfectly fit the 8½ by 11 page. I had actually so internalized that piece of paper – smaller than the A4 that the British use – that I could & would reproduce it even without realizing just what I was doing.

 

One result of this revelation was that I began to buy notebooks – usually those black bound sketchbooks – in order to write on the bus (I wouldn’t learn to drive until I was 42). Another was that I began to write at different times during the day. I actually never went back to writing poetry at night. Thirty-five years later, that’s become my time for longer prose critical writing, but almost never for poetry.

 

For a guy who tends to buy the concept that first thought often does indeed mean best thought – especially if you see the work as a documentation of thinking rather than a well-wrought urn – I note that today the average length of time between my first sketching of a line in “a notebook” to a finished poem tends to be, literally, six or seven years. In my most recent poems, thus, my twins are five and six years old, a far cry from these sprouting young men whose idea of writing (Lewis LaCook will approve) is on PowerPoint, so that they can employ clip art, sound bites & animation.

 

At some point around 1980, inspired by these beautiful small notebooks Lyn Hejinian used – Rhodia Bloc No. 11 is literally what they are called – with little orange covers and pages of blue-lined graph paper, 4 inches tall, 2¾ inches wide, I set out for the hardware store in Manhattan where Lyn told me these could be found. It was in the West Village, the one part of town that is not itself built on a grid pattern &, as I was relatively “new” to New York – I spent time there in the summer of 1964, but not since – I got thoroughly lost until I saw a man walking down the street whom I recognized instantly from his photographs as Joel Oppenheimer. I asked him where this particular address was & he kindly turned me around in sent me in a different (but proper) direction. It would be the only time I ever saw him, as it turned out. I got to the store and promptly bought its entire stock of Bloc Rhodia No. 11 – 23 years hence and I still have a few sitting in a file drawer, waiting to be called into action.