the green notebook :
, fragments of a work-in-progress
I’ve noticed over the past few years that I can find worthwhile generative sparks whenever I dig into a new issue of a journal, and the space to allow myself to read without expectation; ie: no notes, not a review, nothing. Although half the time, a review does emerge from my time flipping through. An essay on arranging short story collections by Ann Beattie in the latest issue of Believer opens with this delightful paragraph: “My grandmother’s advice: after you’ve put on your jewelry, remove one piece. Similarly, there are those who approach flower arranging by plunging an enormous bouquet into a big vase—undoubtedly impressive—then pulling out the heavy-headed peony, or the show-stealing rose, along with all but one stem of fern. Maybe every stem.”
I’ve twenty-one stories in the current manuscript-in-progress, “Very suddenly, all at once,” composed across these past nearly-seven years. In comparison, there are thirty-two stories of similar size and scale in On Beauty (2024), so I’m nowhere near attending to anything around order for these particular pieces. I’ve at least half a dozen or more further stories in various states of incompletion that I still find myself poking at, some of which I might eventually be able to complete, some that might never be. A few months ago, I did at least print off a copy of the finished stories and sit down with a pen, making marks here and there, as well as realizing that, yes, one of those stories has yet to find a proper ending. No wonder it keeps getting rejected. But I’m not quite there yet.
I’ve quite purposefully furthered a thread in On Beauty from my second published novel, Missing Persons (2009), a thread that continued through my novel-in-progress, “wrong answers only,” and even further, into this current manuscript. Really, I should be finishing that novel, as I don’t think I would want the next volume of short stories to appear prior, to maintain that trajectory. What is an author’s intent against what ends up occurring? Perhaps little, I suppose. I go where the writing might take me. I see where I land.
*
The whole morning in a rabbit hole that, so far, has come up empty. So much wasted time.
Wandering through genealogical threads to a sequence of intriguing stories, including two unrelated murders that family members, many generations apart, might not have actually been guilty of, becoming genealogically untethered as I worked to confirm that connection. There was no connection. What are stories once disconnected? Have they still resonance?
I’ve been wandering Puritan histories throughout New England, seeking connection and threads of which I had previously been entirely unaware. I’m up on various branches of Canadian history, although there are stories and corners here too I’ve been learning, through these new attachments, whether the history of the Peter Robinson settlers, the origins of Essex and Dundas Counties, or temporary camps set up for United Empire Loyalists in Quebec.
*
Christine makes plans for England, a conference, organizing the household as tag-along, and my first impulse is to use our departure date as a deadline, to see how much I can complete before leaving the house. I complete and post three poetry reviews across a matter of hours, and provide drafts of four further reviews. I should look at my genealogical non-fiction project, also. If we’re gone for a week, it will take time to re-enter whatever else I leave, mid-thought, on my desk, so I might as well start fresh upon arriving at the airport, and once home a week later, attempt to simply further whatever thoughts this trip might prompt. Will I be able to get anything done at all, with our young ladies along for the ride? I suppose I should think back to our week of Florida, only six months past, which prompted a flurry of reading and notebook writing, even through a full day of Universal Studios and five full days of Disney. I’ve already started thinking about what books I might bring for the flight. I might require a fresh notebook.
*
Released during National Poetry Month, I’m amused that the opening essay of Bruce Whiteman’s Work To Be Done: Selected Essays and Reviews (2024) opens with a complaint about National Poetry Month. I understand the argument: certain media and readers pretending to pay attention to poetry during April when it doesn’t care throughout the remainder of the year. It’s the same reason I don’t wear a poppy for Remembrance Day: for the poppy to have any real meaning, it should be permanently worn. And yet, isn’t that, in the end, an entirely flawed argument? We don’t refuse birthdays or Christmas because it isn’t fair to all the other days, when we don’t think about such things. Acknowledgments, one might suppose, is a good thing. There’s far too much to pay attention to, so holding a collective moment or a day or a month is perhaps a positive. Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Mother’s Day, Grandparents’ Day. Despite all the ambient noise, we take a collective moment to focus on a particular idea, whatever it might be. Poetry month. Does anyone care about poetry month beyond practitioners? Does anyone care about your mother, your grandparents? You do, and that might be enough. Happy Mother’s Day. Isn’t that enough?
Tonight I am hosting an online reading for the University of Alberta Press poetry launch, including a new title by Toronto poet Margaret Christakos. It has been a few years since I’ve heard Margaret read, one of the first people I told when we were pregnant with Rose, well before I should have been telling folk. Susan Newlove once told a story of Robert and Bobbie Louise Creeley being the first people she told about her first pregnancy. Bob was teaching in Vancouver that year, and they were living in the house that Susan and Gerry Gilbert had previously occupied, which meant Susan’s doctor was still in the area. After her appointment, she had already planned on dropping by for a visit. So, Robert and Bobbie Louise Creeley knew first, even before Gerry.
*
Christine and I read in the Pontiac, ninety minutes’ drive west and into Quebec. Might it be worth it? The temperature, far colder than the end of April should ever be. As André du Bouchet wrote in his Journals 1952-1956, as translated by Norma Cole: “I will repeat myself like earth you tread. I will reveal my / monotony.”
Over the past few days I’ve returned to the book-length response I’ve been composing since November, to Laynie Browne’s In Garments Worn by Lindens (2019), itself a response to Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle (1994). I work a sequence of collage-shapes, responding to work by both poets, similar to the kinds of shapes I was working through the book of smaller (2022), except without the foundation of my immediate: domestic, children, etcetera. Instead, I work for the purpose of collaging sound, image. Wordplay. I want, in a more direct way, to see how words and phrases impact upon each other.
Myself, a very pale page.
Where doubt had once lain, visible. The fractioning of this work. A hiatus is nothing. I repeat myself. Presence is not purely contemporary. Of when I am done, complete. This laptop screen, sleek. A sort of despair. This stack of white paper, the cold surface of skin. Transparency, shatters. If you were from the future. I repeat myself. How I realize how I am connected. This outcrop, thickens. A salutation of tone. An occupation.