The languid drama of rain changes …
This is a page from a notebook hand-made by Kaytee. It was given to me for my birthday the year before I wrote this. A finished draft of this prose poem appeared in my 2004 chapbook Sex.
Most of my poems found their start in notebooks – notebooks bought at the Metropolitan on Gottingen Street, Halifax; beautifully bound Chinese notebooks bought at Warshaws on the Main, Montreal; notebooks from art college supply stores and your local Dollarama. The poem above is written in pencil – because once I’d complained to a girlfriend that writing seemed so Jehovah and Patriarchal like Laws Written In Stone and she’d replied, “Why don’t you try writing in pencil? Then, if you don’t like it, you can always erase it.” So I wrote in my notebooks in pencil for the next twelve years.