The notebook is a chronicle of fascinations.

I like how Jim Galvin focuses on teaching poetry as the techne of drawing a person closer to fascination, indicting them in our marvel. He calls delight "an emotional connection to the task that is before us”—and good poetry is a "presentation of passions."

Poetry approaches dread of death by preserving life in tribute—it intensifies the act of living for as long as you engage in it. The tribute does not live in the generalizations but in the specifics and details, which is to say—it is not an abstract man who died but rather, it is a human who collected fedoras and loved cats and taught his children three languages on road trips across America.

The notebook is a space to continue conversations with the self.

Alexandria Peary encourages the writer to continue the conversation with themself, the constant evolution and interrogation. She urges us to "prolong invention," to extend the discursive part of practice by writing down the "interrupting thoughts" in a notebook as they come. Then returning to the present moment, noting the distance of the audience in the space prior to its existence. Against the habit of writing familiar topics, she urges us to cultivate "allegiance to the present moment" and venture off paths, respecting the fluctuations.

The notebook is an encounter with the "I".

Ada Limon addressed the change in her poems, the move to first person, as a sort of commitment to self-knowledge. The challenge of increasing personal stakes by shifting to first person, building the I. "I need to protect myself for my own writing." We're afraid to be direct because it's associated with feminine confessional mode, which has undercurrents of shame.

"Fear is only excitement without breath,” Ada Limon has written—which leads directly to the next part.

The notebook is a compendium of fears, tiny terrors, daily break-beat heart steps.

My obsession with cruelty. Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and others. A religious impulse that flowered after having children. To know that love could be Kali, eating her children. Or Medea, killing them to protect them from the father's lack of love.

The notebook is an inventory of techniques and craft moves.

A place to keep a list of choices or pivots in a poet. Cracks in concrete where something unplanned might bloom. Ada Limon likes endings "that stick to your bones." A good poem has to "make a choice at the end". One snake has to win.

The notebook is a place of personal repudiations and intellectual conflicts.

"The earth appears as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is by its nature undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up."

- Martin Heidegger

My notebooks contain snippets of conversations, letters, articles, essays, and text related to the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The part of me that loves Arendt as a thinker wants to challenge Heidegger, to demand more from a man who hurt so many—and so casually. Where he wants to sacralize the unsayable, I want to write against the silence, against the grain of mercy. I can be my worst and most relentless self in the notebooks; no one will see.

The notebook is a garden for beloved words, an arsenal for poems to come.

Surely CD Wright cribbed a bit from her notebooks to provide this fantastic essay on words and language in poetry:

"I like nouns that go up: loft. And ones that sink: mud. I like the ones that peck: chicken. And canter: canter; those that comfort: flannel and pelt. Cell is an excellent word, in that it sweetly fulfills its assigned sound in a small, thin container. Unlike hell, which is disappointing. Overall. Wanting in force and fury. I like that a lone syllable names a necessary thing: bridge, house, door, food, bed. And the ones that sustain us: dirt, milk, and so on. What a thing, that a syllable—birth, time, space, death—points to the major mysteries with such simplicity, as with a silent finger. And to our very vital parts: head, snout, heart, butt. And our fundamental feeling, fear."

What excellent words get overlooked? What do you love about them? The notebook offers an opportunity to celebrate the words themselves, and how they move—or how they move you—what they want from the line. It is not enough to love a word for its connotations. The poet must palpate the roots. Include etymological notes. Study how a word changes over time.

The notebook is a small hole at the base of a tree where a child hides the miracles adults won’t believe.

The structure of the miracle has a similar form: out of another time, from a time that is alien, arises a ‘god’ who has the characteristics of memory, that silent encyclopedia of singular acts, and who, in religious stories, represents with such fidelity the ‘popular’ memory of those who have no place but who have time—‘Patience!’… But all these variants could very well be no more than the shadows—enlarged into symbolic and narrative projections—thrown by the journalistic practice that consists in seizing the opportunity and making memory the means of transforming places. … In short, what constitutes the implantation of memory in a place that already forms an ensemble? That implantation is the moment which calls for a tightrope-walker’s talent and a sense of tactics; it is the instant of art. Now it is clear that this implantation is neither localized nor determined by memory-knowledge. The occasion is taken advantage of, not created. … Like those birds they lay in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it. … Memory derives its interventionary force from its very capacity to be altered—unmoored, mobile, lacing any fixed position…'

- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

The notebook is a staging ground for the poetry collection.

A quote followed by a reaction and reconfiguration of that quote. I think of Sandra Doller's Memory of the Prose Machine (Dusie Press), and how she uses the Certeau quote at the beginning. How she does this thing with budding phrases that she drops and brings back as refrains. How she builds a sort mini-memoir about family life during the Reagan years (and the demonization of Amy Carter) by jumping around but not saying it explicitly. So it feels muffled, silenced, embued with a casual suburban dread. Unspoken yet said—an undercurrent.

The notebook is a vehicle that enables the mind to re-member.

To remember. Or, as William Maxwell wrote in a letter to a friend a few years before he died:

“Don’t—or at least I don’t think it is reasonable to—feel sad about the transitoriness of things. What you have had you will always have if you are a rememberer.”

Don't forget: the hummingbird's feathers iridesce because each one contains tiny air bubbles that bounce light differently, at different angles. This may matter.

The notebook is a fragmented essay waiting to be shaped.

Brandon Shimoda wrote an essay on poetics as a journal composed from letters to and from friends during a period of time. Called it "fragments from a relationship" rooted in Maine, but also a relationship to the poet self, the voice, the writing:

"Everything is not a poem. How could there be any solidification? My recent feeling is that poetry is nothing more (or less) than the attempt to make a thing called a "poem," which means that nothing is actually a poem, and everything is not. Nothing short of our last day on earth, the one we will not remember, for having quit life on its heels. And so it is, simply, life, another way to spend it. Consolation is often confused for salvation. But poetry?"

Notebooks allow us to date, or to situate thoughts in time, to watch how a footprint melts in the snow and becomes something else.

The notebook is a monastery for the preservation of arcana.

Francis Ponge said: "Another way to approach a thing is to consider it unnamed, as well as unnameable."

Ponge's essay, "The Pebble," takes a mystical approach to a physical object by probing its myths, origins, and powers. The notebook is filled with pebbles and opportunities.

The notebook is a series of musings on craft, the surprising scaffold for a craft essay.

I’m thinking of Dan Beachy-Quick's "January Notebook", which mixes observations on the season with thoughts on poetry. I’m thinking of this:

Why do I keep reminding myself that Homer wasted away to his death, refusing to eat or drink, because he could not understand what the young boys fishing meant when they said, What we caught we left behind, and what we missed we bring home. Homer being that poet who is some figure of us all, that poet who went blind because he refused to alter what he wrote about Helen when Helen’s spirit demanded he retract. He could not see through the riddle, and so he died. The boys were speaking about lice.

The notebook is a space for self-reflection—for seeing our expectations starkly.

To write is to make it real. Or to value something enough to create it. To stare at it later. To transcribe the way the world washes over us. To unobserve the self.

In her essay, “The Discipline of the Notebook,” novelist Bonnie Friedman says the days she doesn't write return her to "the incomprehensible-feeling person" she was when demanding excessive things from her mother, trapped in the image of those "excessive, inalienable needs.” Friedman says we have to: “attract our materials before we can see what they promise...The vessel precedes significance. In a way, it is the signficande: the commitment to register life. And beyond that—the conviction that perception itself salvages, saves.”

The notebook is a home for abandoned, overlooked images.

"A writer's notebook becomes a record, or the objectification of a mind," said Lydia Davis in her essay, “Revising One Sentence." Davis keeps her notebook near her writing to catch images that appear in the wrong story. She doesn't adopt out those orphans by wedging them in but offers them to the notebook. Then her mind is free from worrying about the orphan image. It is safe to go back into writing.

The notebook protects others from the least humane parts of me.

Sometimes notebooks protect others from me. Bonnie Friedman remembers being seven and the "sadness, shame, and need—a stuck-together heap, something untranslatable, craving expression but defying it." She claims to revert to this "untranslatable girl again" when she doesn't notebook. 

I am a neighbor to myself, tapping behind the wall, shifting, trying not to panic. Without the notebook, who knows what anything means?