The KN105 and the Poet

Sometimes I envy graphic artists the accessibility of their art, its tactile nature. You paint a painting and there it is, on the wall. You make it with your hands. You don’t have to read it aloud to people, and nobody has to decipher it if they don’t want to. They can just look, soak it up wordlessly. There is direct access from the eye to the primitive brain.

However, when I start to feel too sorry for myself, having to rely on the intermediary of words and such, I sternly remind myself that I can practice my art pretty much anywhere. All I need is a writing implement and a piece of paper. If I were less neurotic about my tools, I could even dictate into my phone as I sat in traffic. This is never going to happen, for three excellent reasons, upon which I am about to elaborate in a bulleted list ( in a former life I was a tech writer, more on that later):

• To be able to work at all, I need not only pen and paper, but my actual poetry notebook.

• My pen has to be the right pen. Not a 0.38 nib and good grief certainly not a 0.7. I’m talking 0.5. Hybrid Technica KN105. Or a Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine.

• My notebook has to be the right notebook. Nothing with garish lines and cutesy designs on every page. Nothing with eco-friendly but ink-unfriendly absorbent paper. Nothing too largely spiral bound, I’m left-handed. Creamy pages better than bright white.

I could go on, but you get my drift. I really care about my tools. What the heck: poets don’t have much overhead. I don’t have to shell out for tyrian purple or gold leaf. So I may as well really enjoy the equipment. Until my late 20s, I wrote with nothing but fountain pens, which I diligently filled with Parker black ink. I preferred the reservoirs that sucked up the ink to those that sucked  it in the side. I was constantly wearing nibs down with all the scribbling, and my fingers were perennially smudged. Then Pilot and Pentel started coming out with gems like the Precise V5 Extra Fine Rolling Ball, and I entered the 21^st century, somewhat ruefully putting my Dickensian nibs away in a box. I still take them out and touch them sometimes.

Paper is ubiquitous in the first world. I’m lucky that way, and yet except for jotting down fragments of thought, which I can do on a stick-it or a restaurant napkin, I really need my notebook. My writing process means that without all the scribblings of the last few weeks, I cannot get started. Unless a poem comes to me in one fluid session (it happens), I usually need a jump start. I’ll read over my recent notes, and if that doesn’t do it, flip further back in the book until something catches my eye, a phrase, a list of words, a fragment of unfinished poem I can build on.

This makes starting new poetry notebooks alarming, like being faced with the proverbial blank canvas. I miss the vital reassurance of everything I’ve been working on in the past few months, even the poems that are signed, sealed, and delivered. I need their comforting presence to inform the new work. I need to see the evidence of their evolution to remind me that every time I have ever been without inspiration, I have worked through it, started again, picked up and something new and sometimes better has emerged.

The physical act of transcribing fragments in my notebook often triggers new ideas. I don’t know the neuroscience behind it, but something in the act of writing inspires my creativity. Maybe it’s the speed at which the pen moves, maybe the sound of it – a faint scratching, so much more soothing than the clacking of a keyboard – or maybe it’s the feel of it, the paper under my hand, the heft of the pen. Writing is immensely tactile for me. Turns out that after all is said and done, I make poems with my hands.