When I set about planning and packing for a week on the water last year, I knew I wouldn’t be bringing my laptop. The electrical power on the schooner was mostly from some powerful batteries and two small solar panels. We could charge our cell phones and had small lights in our cabins, but that was about it.

I did pack a Paris Review and a Harper’s magazine, should I feel like indulging in reading, but the heart of my “literary” life focused on a small red journal I had picked up a year or so earlier plus a few printouts of Vincent Katz poems that set a direction that has intrigued me.

Katz, like his father, the American painter Alex Katz, can look at mundane things in a seemingly flat tone that feels seminal.

Consider the line, “I wish I lived here but I do live here,” from “Francis Bacon.” It’s a feeling I know.

As he says in “Back on 8th Ave.”:

The job of the poet is not easy:
be utterly observant, tracking,
and to note down, in plain language,
with minimal emotional distortion,
what s/he sees.

 

For me, it had been ages since I’d sat down before a blank page and started off without any idea of where the words would be going. My usual journaling at least has a calendar full of events to catch up on, plus notes I’ve scribbled out, maybe even emails. And my more public writing has been things like this, with a purpose.

My goal was to fill the little notebook in a week. Quality or substance was not the measure. Just look and listen and try to be very much in the present moment.

It was a harder assignment than you might think. But it did provide much of the text for many of the posts you’ll be seeing this year.

Here are a few samples of what I entered:

looking for the obvious can be a challenge

 ~*~

Yellow house
behind a brown one
on a hill
flagpole and staircase
down to a wharf

the dreadful verses
you attempted
page after page
of aspiring youth
reached and fell

that stuff now is flatter
but more secure

likely no more profound
or less

don’t worry, Jnana, nothing’s happening
you’d think I could fill this small notebook with drivel in a week
but I’m halfway short

I did end the entries

[to be continued]

Hopefully, on an upcoming cruise in late summer.