First, I turn the notebook upside down.
That way, the spiral binding—a binding that spirals—is on the right-hand side, allowing room for the pencil in my left hand to move across the unlined page. It’s a Beinfang (good tooth?) sketchbook, so no need for lines. Like a good number of poets, including Robert Grenier and Lewis Freedman, I find that drawing is one of the zillion actions that writing is: you’re drawing each letter when you write a word by hand.
Doing so allows other words to be seen residing in, or growing from, the words you’ve written. You see that other words can be made of the letters you’ve drawn, as if the letters can float around the page and attach themselves to others. You’re aware of how the combinations of shapes (each letter being a shape) can be rearranged, moved, altered to make something else: other letters and words, which in turn reveal things you didn’t expect to see or say or remember or think or feel.
They, the letters, are little life-forms made of graphite and sound; they can move. I think they breathe, too.
When the page is full, I turn the page over to write on the reverse side. But I have to turn the page “backwards,” from left to right, and then I have to turn it upside down again, or else the spiral would be on the left and my hand would knock into it while writing. I like that a spiral is physically part of the page, is in fact holding together the pages of such a notebook, and that spiral is both noun and verb. The wire binding spirals neatly through 35 holes. The page has all those holes, off to the side.
When I was waiting to record the audio version of my book One Big Time at the Jack Straw Studio in Seattle before the book existed (oxymoronic but true), I had a smaller sketchbook with me. I drew the title as a form of waiting. I could say I wrote the title in my sketchbook, but here’s what happened when I wrote it:
The physical direction of the writing changed, or extended in another direction, and some other words emerged (“no epistle bethought itself”). Along with a creature of some kind, and then, on the next page, a person’s head, with who knows what coming out of it. Letters, words, “an accurate epistle” (Shelley, “The Witch of Atlas”), waiting to be discerned within the undefined graphite marks? Maybe the start of another poem, however illegible those moments’ drawings, pictured above.
If so, the emergent writing wouldn’t really be separate from one’s other, earlier poems, which I’ve come to understand are connected, are really all one thing (poem). Or maybe there are a few different poems one is writing throughout a life, but not nearly as many as get titled separately and are imagined to be a new or separate poem. I think that this phenomenon of one big poem, or maybe two or three, holds true even across one’s books; it doesn’t matter how far apart the books were written or published. The poems, the books, don’t mark chronology; they sound a synchrony—an intimation that writing is an experience of simultaneity.
When I give a poetry reading now, I read from the newest book in thanks to its publisher, but also from earlier books when my ear detects a continuity between a sequence in, say, F L O W E R C A R T and part of a sequence in The Happiness Experiment, and a poem or two in Current or Dear, Read. It was a shock to hear, when I first experimented with this in MC Hyland’s backyard in St. Paul a few months ago, that they aren’t actually separate poems or separate books. I’ll note that I chose the pieces attentively in relation to each other and have continued this practice in recent readings; it’s not a random process. I think synchrony doesn’t necessarily arrive accidentally but has to be listened for and felt.
The poetry readings I’ve given since then, not separating poems from book to book (not pausing to distinguish them or explain), have felt more dimensional, and, it turns out, they embody what the speaker discovers by the end of One Big Time. In that quest-narrative pretty much written in a kayak, the poem discovers that all five lakes are actually a single waterbody. For the fourteen days that I was looking for a passage from one lake to another, I had been, I suddenly realized, looking for a passage from part of the water to another part—or, more precisely, from one place within the giant waterbody to another place within it. It was exhilarating to perceive (by way of repeatedly failing to find the “passage”) that the “five” lakes’ separate names are only a human way of organizing them for purposes of orientation. Same, perhaps, with all verbal mechanisms for naming time, such as “this day, that day”—
If you could say water’s
continuous, one
continuous body of water|
that goes over land
here, there,
then of time you could say
the same: it’s one big time
with different names
(yesterday, today, &c)
(One Big Time, p. 44)
It occurred to me only in the wake of having written that book and preparing to read from it at MC’s that the logic applies to one’s poems and books, too. And maybe not only to “one’s” own.
One of the myriad ways in which P. B. Shelley thought about poetry was as “effluence,” which in his lifetime (1792-1822) meant “a flowing out (esp. of light, electricity, magnetism, etc.)” or “that which flows forth, an emanation” (OED). Shelley suggests that even fragments and “isolated portions” of poems or compositions by different people in any time or place may be recognized as “episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.” He imagined a poem to be “a fountain forever overflowing [. . .] and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations ever are developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.” (“A Defence of Poetry”).
A fountain one moment, a magnetic field the next: “as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains” the life of poetry across the ages. Unexpectedly, describing my recent approach to poetry readings has brought me to Shelley, whose notion of poetry’s “secret alchemy” and whose revolutionary politics were deeply formative for me more than thirty years ago. He’s involved, I find, in my glimpse of the “invisible effluence” between poems across separate books, and this glimpse itself has been an unexpected consequence of how I found myself navigating from lake to lake (I thought) in a boat.
In other words (leaving Shelley aside for the moment), my sensation of the continuity of poems across books while preparing to read from the new book is informed by the conditions that shaped that book’s making. The water-borne poems’ means of formation has, for me, gradually opened onto an understanding of how matter is connected. As I notice when I turn the notebook upside down so that my hand can move across the page, letters and sounds are matter: the poems’ matter.
As for Shelley, his notion of poetry as “effluence”—an invisible current flowing between sounds and words across poems, times, poets, places—leads him to a proposition I’ve always found deeply strange and strangely haunting. Possibly vexing, secretly thrilling: that all poems may be connected, may be parts of an infinite poem being built up “since the beginning of the world” in ways we can’t perceive or imagine, because the nature of what we call “time” is so vast and after all, or from the start, synchronous.
Lisa Fishman is the author of One Big Time, a book-length poem sequence from Wave Books (2025). Her earlier poetry books include 24 Pages and other poems and Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave). She also writes fiction, including World Naked Bike Ride (stories) and a forthcoming novel, Write Back Now!, published in Canada on Gaspereau Press and 1366 Editions, respectively. Another recent essay, “A Careening Wharf (for a Time),” was published in the Poetry Foundation’s “This Be the Place” series. A dual US/Canadian with early roots in Montreal, Fishman divides her time between Nova Scotia and Wisconsin and teaches at Columbia College Chicago.