Among the notebooks in rotation right now is a cheap blue one. Spiral-bound, with post-it notes taped to the cover. The most prominent reads “CLARIFY/SIMPLIFY language/process.”
I bought this notebook specifically for use in my salaried day-job. I have a lot of conversations at work, and I do a lot of what tech folks call “discovery.” Taking notes helps me understand what I’m hearing.
But because a) I move house every several weeks, and b) the discrete categories of my daily life are becoming more and more entangled (integrated?), the kinds of things that end up in this notebook go well beyond conversations about UX research. I scribble things I want to tell a friend later, questions to ask a new acquaintance, books I want to read, fragments of maybe-poems, tables of data for projects that have nothing to do with work.
I was flipping through the notebook today, looking for something half-remembered. I did find it, and in the meantime my own ink-swirled signals arranged themselves like they thought they were a poem.
Ice of morning mellows into the green expanse of river.
I’m feeling pretty broken, TBH.
What are the questions we want this to answer?
Maybe I should meet with more people to talk about ideas.
(Fungi lichen umbellifers oxalis.)
I suggest limited adoption.
Principles followed in cataloging and sorting:
always a process, a mindset, a philosophy.
Does reverence come from art, or art from reverence?
How can I help?
The house, the work, the practice.
Close at hand: the cat, adorably snoring.
The other day, I needed to write one of those “tell us about yourself”-type profiles. A thing I left out is my identity as a poet. “I am a poet” is such an awkward thing to say! What am I expecting a listener or a reader to do with that information? It’s absolutely important to me, but what it means to you is so open to wild and fluctuating interpretation that I don’t quite know how to approach it unless I’m having an unhurried, one-to-one conversation with you. It’s like writing “I am a Christian” without offering any context—except even more fundamentally amorphous.
One thing being a poet provokes in me is this accidental practice of perceiving meaning in scraps of text that are unrelated, except in their physical proximity. And then letting that meaning be sort of gently interesting to me. Seriously considered, but fundamentally ambiguous in function. Nothing I need to pin down or schedule or submit to journal or (God forbid) monetize. Nothing that has to become a poem, but maybe it wants to play at being one? Word play.
Is this a serious way to make poetry? Is an arrangement of unrelated fragments a poem? I don’t know, but I like it as a site of play.
This particular arrangement is also as good a pulse on my life as anything I’ve written lately in my actual journal. Is that why I’m sharing it on this thing I resisted for years calling a blog, that is definitely a blog?
Also I’m sharing it because I’m one of culture’s awkward creatures, a poet. Sometimes I’m out to “CLARIFY/SIMPLIFY language/process.” I’m also here to play around in the complicated, opaque mud.
Tara K. Shepersky 