The Joy of a New Notebook
On Starting Fresh
My birthday was earlier this month, and one of my presents was a new journal. This was fortuitous timing, since I have just come to the end of my latest poetry journal, a rainbow-tessellated hardcover I found at Goodwill. I started this journal December 31, 2022. It is full of decent drafts, terrible tries, and several pieces I am proud of, pieces that expanded my thinking, that improved my craft, that dazzled me with the possibilities of language.
Something has shifted in my writing perspective lately. Maybe it is the post-MFA-residency inspiration (in March and in August). Maybe it is because I am reading a lot of Shakespeare this year and it’s like learning a new language—my ear, my rhythms, my vocabulary are changing. Maybe it is a renewed self-confidence related to recent poems I’ve written or revised. Maybe it is the new journal.
When I start a new notebook, including my “butt notebooks,” I am always anxious about the first page written. I want it to be a good opener to the rest of the journal. In one butt notebook (you know, a back-pocket-sized commonplace book), started April 2021, I wrote on the first page:
First pages of fresh notebooks hold such promise, yet the first words written are often disappointing.
An empty journal is one of the most exciting things in a writer’s life. The blank pages could hold anything. I know that when I reach the end of the journal, I will be a changed person, changed because of what I’ve discovered through the process of writing. Writing is not about expressing what I already know. It’s a process of surprise, of revelation. This prospect is what makes fresh notebooks so promising, so exciting.
My new journal is navy blue, with a soft cover made of reclaimed wool. I started writing in it last weekend while on a family camping trip.
I finished the last poetry journal with a set of poems I really like. One of them gave me goosebumps as I came to the end of it. I had not seen the final lines when I began the poem, and when they arrived, I got chills. That may sound like I’m tooting my own horn. But the chills and bumps are not a self-aggrandizing overstatement. They are a testament to the power of writing, that it can surprise us, can reveal us to ourselves, can bring hidden truth to light.
In the new journal, I started by writing in full W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The poem talks about suffering and makes reference to Pieter Brueghel’s painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” In this painting, you have to hunt for Icarus’s legs splashing in the water in the lower corner. No one sees the tragedy; they all carry on with their lives, seemingly indifferent to the suffering of others. I then wrote a poem in response to the opening lines: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters.”
I wrote two more poems the next morning, and one per day since. Each poem feels like something new: a new self-confidence, a new freedom, a new poetic sensibility. The new notebook surely helps.
Right now, I’m starting to understand why some writers burn their work. There is something freeing about starting over, about “burning the past.” It is a cleansing fire.
When I was in seminary, I set out to write a complete, systematic compendium of my beliefs, ideas, etc. about theology and the Bible. I didn’t make it far, because other things pulled my attention away. But a few years later, I looked back at those brief writings and chuckled. My beliefs had changed, my understanding of things had changed. But I tried again, though with more modest aims—perhaps not a complete compendium, but something systematic. Again, I didn’t make it far.
When I started writing poetry in earnest in 2018, I thought of poems as my “systematic compendium” containers. That is, each poem was like a block in a big structure of my understanding of life. Some poems had to be written because they covered gaps, or established foundations, or brought together threads in a gestalt moment. I filled some poems with too many ideas or images, trying to fit everything in.
The more poems I wrote, the fuller my “compendium” felt. “I’ve already written a poem about that,” I’d say, “I’m good to go. I don’t need to write another.” Poems were like encyclopedic entries. One poem, one idea. Move on to the next idea. Note: in the writing of poems, I wasn’t consciously thinking about which gaps to fill. But after each poem was done, I mentally slotted it into the superstructure.
In April this year, I wrote a poem I didn’t expect. It was a response to an uninspiring writing prompt from Instagram my coworker showed me. I didn’t write to fill a gap. I didn’t even know what gap it would fill. But the poem felt authentically me, like I could hear my own voice in it. I didn’t write much else worth remembering after that, though my revisions on 50+ poems this summer have been fruitful.
The poems I’ve written in recent weeks, covering the last few pages of rainbow journal and the first few of wool journal, have felt different. More authentically me, but also taking more risks, pushing myself to more surprise. I have joy in what I’ve recently written.
And part of me wants to burn all my earlier poems. The “compendious structure” I’ve been filling in with poems now feels constricting. If that one poem (or maybe two) “covers” my thinking on such-and-such an idea or experience, what room does that leave for new dis-“cover”-y? Maybe it’s less about burning my earlier work and more about dismantling the self-imposed structure that tells me “been there, done that, nothing more to learn here.”
I won’t burn my earlier work because even if it is immature, even if it is poor quality, even if it is a dead end, it was necessary to my journey to this point. Without my earlier work, I wouldn’t have my latest work. In those early poems, there is still surprise, insight, profundity. It may be underdeveloped. It may be “touristy.” Mining my past work is like panning for gold. How wise was I then, and how might I understand that wisdom now?
In middle school, I started writing songs. I filled dozens of spiral notebooks all the way through high school, learning to play guitar along the way and setting many of my lyrics to music. One of my biggest regrets is that in 2015, when my parents sold their house and moved to another state, I took all those notebooks out of my bedroom, and without even looking inside, I threw them away. “I don’t have space for these,” I said, which was true. Now I wish I could go back and read through them, pulling out what I find interesting or surprising. I have only vague snippets of lines in my memory.
Earlier this year, I was introduced to the movie Paterson, starring Adam Driver. Driver plays a bus driver (imagine that, the driver Driver) who writes poems. Every day he has the same routine—including a new poem—though each day has its own incidents. Mild spoiler alert—if you don’t want to read it, you can skip to the next paragraph. You’ve been warned! At the end of the week, Driver loses his poetry journal, but then receives a new one. There is the sadness and shock of the loss of earlier work, but there is also the freedom of new possibilities, unbound by what has come before.
In the preface to William Stafford’s poetry anthology, Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems, his son Kim recalls his father saying, “I would trade everything I have ever written for the next thing.” I’m not sure I’m quite at that stage yet. I have only an inkling of a changed perspective, a renewed sense of poetic wonder and desire.
New wine requires new wineskins, and new writing a new notebook. Everything I thought I knew in those early poems will be rethought. Some will remain, most will be revised, reimagined, recontextualized. Writing is a continual process of discovery and rediscovery. Starting a fresh writing journal helps to reset the mind, the soul.
How do you feel when you start a new notebook, whether for creative writing, journaling, list-making, venting, songwriting, letter-writing, note-taking, commonplacing, etc.? Let me know!
Thanks for reading!