I learned from Denise Levertov, my first poetry teacher, the value of keeping a journal, something she did regularly as a way of inviting the Muse. Actually, she kept two kinds of journals, and she encouraged her students to follow her example. One was a writer’s notebook—a place to jot down lines from important poems or passages that expanded or deepened your understanding of poetry. If a word, phrase, or image came to us, she encouraged us to write it down in our notebooks; also snippets of conversation and observations of people and objects.
The other kind of journal Levertov kept was a dream journal. As an enthusiastic reader of Carl Jung, Levertov placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of dreams. She believed they were worth recording and that once written in the notebooks might become the seeds from which poems could sprout. She once shared an example of a fragment of one of her own dreams that she had recorded about a sandal with a broken thong, which later resulted in a poem (“The Broken Sandal”).
I took Levertov’s advice. Keeping a writer’s notebook is something I began back then, so many years ago when I first started out as a poet. I have had one ever since. From time to time, I have also kept a dream journal. My notebooks have been the place where my own ideas about poetry have evolved, as well as where many of my own poems have gotten their start.
I used my practice of journaling when working on my first poetry collection, The Buffalo Sequence. The poems document my efforts to retrieve the memories of my childhood, growing up in the working-class Polish neighborhoods of Buffalo, New York. It was also an attempt to recover the colorful language and ethnic speech patterns that had been educated out of me as I followed the path to become a fully assimilated, collegeeducated American. At the time of composing those poems, I carried on an active correspondence with friends and relatives back in Buffalo, often recording in my notebook stories, images, and phrases copied out of their letters.
The following poem from The Buffalo Sequence is an imaginative para-phrase of my mother’s letters, in which she always spoke of herself in the third person. The first draft was written in my notebook:
[Dear …]
Today there is no letter from her boys
and her son’s mother is sad.
Her son’s father is sad too
—they know how he misses his boys;
and couldn’t they show a little more appreciation?
Today when there is no word,
she is watching her husband in his uneasy rest.
He has finished dinner and now
stretches his skin, rough from hard work,
wall to wall on the living room floor.
The noise his belly makes,
she is certain,
he must be digesting over and over
the meal stewed once again
with the bones of happier days.
Her sons know their father is a good man.
If there is any place not full in his belly now
it is where he keeps a vacancy,
anytime, for his boys.
And couldn’t they show a little more appreciation?
Last night, her husband did not sleep
but tossed and tossed….
When he pulled the sheets over his head
she thought it was the dark wave
that one forgets under, forever.
She worries about that good man.
Recently, his liver has been remembering
his wild younger days
—before her son’s mother knew him;
her husband is getting old and she worries …
Her sons know their father never complains.
She could tell,
his great arched rib ached him
when he came home from work today,
the one he stretches from horizon to horizon
to keep back the darkness for his boys.
Her sons really could show a little more appreciation.
[Mother]
This habit of keeping a writer’s notebook gained additional value for me when the time came to trade in my young poet, Bohemian lifestyle for the responsibilities of husband and parent, which included holding down a regular job. It became my way of keeping in touch with my poet-self whenever the demands of teaching, college administration, and editing a magazine interfered with writing poems on a regular basis and also kept me from reading poetry for my own pleasure for days or weeks at a time. My notebook, besides being a connection to my interior self and a way of perceiving the world, was a place for me to work out my ideas about poetry, and a place to chart the evolution of my own work and where it was headed. On those pages I wrote down passages from other poets, and from writers about craft, as well as their thoughts about what constituted poetry.
My notebook became a workbook for fleshing out my own poetics, building on the ideas and practice of others. At that time, I was a devoted reader of Henry David Thoreau’s journals. When I learned that he had copied out and rearranged pieces from them thematically to construct his justly famous essays and Walden, I became inspired to mine the material from my own notebooks and organize it. This approach led me to write several essays on poetry, editing, class, and ethnicity.
The example below is my journal entry in response to something poet David Ignatow once said in an interview that is included in his book of essays and interviews, Open between Us, edited by Ralph J. Mills.
Excerpt from 1983:
The question, what makes a “found poem” a poem, is essentially the same question as was once asked about the “free verse” poem and, more recently, about the “prose poem.” The answer is essentially the same. “It’s vision that counts.” That’s how David Ignatow put it. “Anything that’s held together by an insight, around which everything gathers and goes towards and helps build—that is a poem.”
I later returned to my notebook where I reflected at some length on this idea of vision as the organizing principle for poems, and I linked it with other statements about poetry that I’d copied out by Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp. Eventually, I combined all these with descriptions of my habit of working with found language in my own poems. The result was the essay on found poetry, “Machines Made of Words,” that appeared in the literary magazine Object Lesson. The habit of keeping a journal helped me collect ideas and work out the essay’s outline.
Starting about ten years ago, something new happened in my notebooks that coincided with spending a few weeks each summer with my family in a rented cottage on the coast of Maine. My entries began to include things noticed from the porch overlooking Tenant’s Harbor where I sat reading early each morning, or while strolling the rocky shores, or touring the surrounding area by car on rainy days. Observations about lobstermen and their boats, about the varieties of luxury yachts at anchor, about the flora and fauna of the area, about the local residents and their habits filled the pages, as did place names, fragments of overheard conversations, and words and phrases found on signs, on restaurant placemats, and in the regional newspapers.
Soon the variety of entries in my notebooks rivaled the thirteenthcentury Japanese Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. This change in the content of my writer’s notebook eventually resulted in “Hart’s Neck Haibun,” a lengthy, five-part poetic journal that makes up the backbone of my latest poetry collection, Official Versions (2006). Haibun is a Japanese poetic form dating back many centuries that alternates prose passages with haiku poems. The most famous example is Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, his travel journal written as haibun. I adopted the form because it was roughly analogous to my Maine journals.
The poetic journal / haibun became the primary mode of writing for me, one that I valued in itself and not just as a workbook for ideas that would later find their way into crafted essays or discrete poems. My new regard for the material that filled my notebook pages soon echoed Thoreau’s, who privileged his journals over his other writing, because they were more spontaneous and closer to his lived life.
Here is an excerpt from Journals of Henry David Thoreau written on January 27, 1852:
Thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together in separate essays. They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not far-fetched. It is more simple, less artful.
In other words, like Thoreau, I began to see the poetic journal as a distinct genre, different from my writer’s notebook. Analogous to Thoreau’s journals, are artists’ sketchbooks and their relation to finished paintings. Traditionally, the sketchbook was used in the field to record quick impressions later to be fully worked up in the studio into large paintings in oils on stretched canvases; but some artists came to see their plein air sketches on paper, bound in notebooks, done in pencil, pastel crayon, or watercolors, as finished works in themselves. In the end, journaling is a question of intention—whether the journal is a private record not meant for publication, an artifact, or written with publication in mind.
Keeping a journal of observational poems is no longer only what I do during summer vacations. It has now become a regular mode of working for me—putting down words, sometimes in lines, sometimes in sentences, daily, or nearly daily in spiral-bound six-by-four-inch notebooks that I carry with me at all times.
Since studying with Denise Levertov, I realize that the poetic journal is a literary genre, distinct from the journal as workbook. Unlike what I learned from Levertov’s insistence on keeping a writer’s notebook, this was a lesson I absorbed through osmosis, by being in her presence, rather than through her conscious instruction. In the late sixties and early seventies, she brought to our class new installments pulled fresh from her typewriter of a poetic journal-in-progress that she had begun the year before. She invited us to read and discuss them, offer comments and suggestions in the same way we did with one another’s work.
Reading her journal poems was a revelation, coming as they did right after a class on The Waste Land (not taught be Levertov) where the focus was Eliot’s ideas about poems as carefully worked texts, steeped in classical literary references. Levertov, in contrast, demonstrated by example that effective poems could just as well be fresh and spontaneous as one’s response to the day’s events. They could be about what you were feeling at the moment, or about things you had just observed or recently contemplated.
Published journals and daybooks were commonplace in the sixties and seventies. A number of them were written by Levertov’s contemporaries, including fellow “New” American poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, Philip Whalen, John Weiners, and Joanne Kyger. What made Levertov’s poetic journal different was her conscious attempt to give shape and structure to it. The result is a push and pull between viewing the whole, as she indicates in her preface of To Stay Alive, “as table or chair with the requisite number of legs so as not to wobble”—a definition of poetic craft that Levertov borrowed from Ezra Pound—versus the poem as “a record of one person’s inner / outer experience of America during the sixties and beginning of the seventies.”
Levertov’s “notebook” poem is an invaluable model that I will continue to look to for the answer to these questions as my own work in this genre continues to evolve. My instinct tells me that the journal poem or poem as journal needs to allow for some wobble; but wobble of a kind that, although eccentric like a top’s, nevertheless follows a pattern around a center of balance.