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Try This! Doodle Your Listening
Heidi Mordhorst
I debated for a long time about how many notebooks to keep: one for school, one for poetry, one for my calendar/agenda, one for everyday household business, one for—yep, that was too many notebooks to juggle.
In the end, I do keep a separate binder for my teacher stuff, but for all other purposes I have Just One Notebook. I use it for intentional sitting-down-to-write, but it’s also the one that I take to writing conferences, to services at my congregation, to a political meeting, to a wellness workshop. The pages below are from a workshop called “Redefining Health,” and they definitely do not capture the organized thread of the presentation! Instead you see my doodled, fonted, decorated, designed version of it. I have recorded certain turns of phrase, questions for myself, pairings of words, tangents, direct quotes, and there are lots of possibilities for mining poems from the graphic details.
I’m calling this thing you might also like to try “DOODLE YOUR LISTENING.” Carry your notebook anywhere you’ll be sitting and listening--in the car with the radio on, in church, at a meeting, at the pool where people don’t know you’re listening! Design and decorate your notes to see what happens!
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) had it right:
“A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that ‘great wits have short memories:' and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.”
—from “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet”
—from “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet”
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Matt Forrest Esenwine continues his Big Year of Breakout by hosting Poetry Friday today at Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme. Go congratulate him on his first book contract!
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