Quire - 25 Pieces of Paper

How do you feel about time travel?  You’re cool with it?  Excellent!  Allow me to take you back to February, 2003, on an excellent literary adventure.  Picture it, a sleepless night in Seattle (erm …  more like Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia), it is frigid wintery cold outside and yours truly can’t sleep.  It is not uncommon for me when I am unable to settle, to turn to my trusted friend and confidant, The Dictionary.  Yes kids, I am nerdy enough that when counting sheep fails me, I read the good book.  Insomnia on occasion can foster inspiration and that’s exactly what happened this particular eve.

I stumbled out of my comfortably warm bed and scuffed into my writing room, defeated by awake-ness and did my usual – turned on the ‘red’ lamp as I like to call it (not too bright, but not too dark so that I can’t read), popped in some music and plopped down in my chair yawning while my computer booted up.  That’s me with insomnia in a nutshell.  Some people reach for the TV remote, some people stumble to the fridge, I hold up in my writing room.  After all, that’s where The Dictionary lives.

Browsing the pages this night, I flipped to Q.  Rare but it sometimes happens.  I tend to shy away from Q words in poetry because I feel like they will seem too elitist or self-important in verse.  Only this time, something miraculous happened, I found one Q word that birthed an entire cycle of poems that took two full days of hibernation to complete.

One word:  QUIRE.

Quire – a set of 25 (formally 24) sheets of paper (a twentieth of a ream).   This word sighting set the wheels in motion.  My thought immediately was, ’25 sheets of paper!?  Let’s write 25 poems and title them One through Twenty-Five!’.  And so I did.  I instantly forgot I was dead tired and couldn’t sleep.  I threw my headphones on, turned my stereo up to eleven, opened Word and went on a writing spree.  It came so freely and easily.  I spent two whole days scribbling, editing and re-writing until I finished all 25.  I was elated in the end, exhilarated.  If you’re wondering how I can recall all of this so easily, it’s because I wrote a little journal entry about how amazing those two days were and I remember it like it was yesterday.

I didn’t do anything with ‘Quire’ after I wrote it except print it out on crisp white paper with a blood red cover page and tucked it carefully into a report cover that stood next to all the other volumes of writing I was accumulating.  I took it down off of my shelf last night after I launched ‘The Paper Teapot’ and thought it was worth writing about today and sharing a few of the poems I spent those 48 hours creating.  Admittedly, they are a little more esoteric compared to some of my other work but they stand quite nicely up to any of the rest.

Here are a few samples from that writing session:

Thirteen

architecture is responsible for the concept of my sadness

I was meant to be an instrument of great style and perception

a conversation with elegant voices changed the course of things

I counted a spray of delicate flowers to make amends

an offering of beautiful lips and popular songs as an apology

I am waiting for my favorite boy to open his window and smile

a sight I count on habitually but he is too poor in manners to show

I am extraordinarily optimistic

*

Sixteen

I listen to her weep when she talks about war

the pulling apart of her favorite toys and towns

I watch her shoot poems from her hip

acknowledging the air with grateful firecracker passion

she offers me chocolate icecream when I visit

with a smile and a big spoon

she is beautiful

*

Twenty Five

I exposed a spirited and edifying

collection of private handwritten letters

when I opened your sock drawer

I read them all and sacrificed my talent

relinquished a cassette of somber hymns

stole the words

stored them in my bedside table

I know your secrets

how you like to jump through hoops

and mash ripe strawberries into thick soup

you are perfect for me

*

And there you have it, a little bit of time travel.  Thank you for flying in my hot tub time machine.

It could be said that I am not a disciplined writer.  I write off the cuff, when the mood strikes.  I try to make an effort to write every day.  I am not always successful.  However, if something doesn’t pour onto  the page, I do make an effort to at least read a poem, a story or listen to music or take a moment to eye a piece of art or browse through my postcard collection.  Anything to at least touch, taste, sense or hear something created by another human being.  When life gets in the way of being able to hide away for hours on end, writing like a mad woman, I am still able to, in some small way, be tuned in to creativity.  It is my constant desire to be surrounded by and appreciate the lucidity and the tenderness derived from creative output, from my own being or that of others.  It’s fundamental to my happiness.  I am also in complete agreement with a brave and honest line from ‘The Right to Write’ by Julia Cameron that states: ‘Writing with discipline invites extremism.’  It forces you to spent time with the parts of yourself that are lean with imagination rather than the facets that are dazzled and inspired by the elements surrounding you.  I prefer to not schedule inspiration and let the Muse come willingly.  It fashions pure joy that for me, really can’t be put into words.

I have a busy weekend ahead, people to see, occasions to celebrate and with any luck a few quiet moments of peace and quiet.  My goal is to at least scribble a little something, even if it’s a line or an idea or title for something.  I also hope to get a few pages of my book in (I’m currently reading ‘The Hour I First Believed’ by Wally Lamb which is taking me forever because it’s a long, thick novel that I usually only get to spend time with on my commute home from work and it’s difficult to put down it’s so good).  The objective is to keep on keeping on and do as EB White mused, ‘Be obscure clearly.’

Happy weekend, friendly readers and fellow creatives! 

In propinquity,

Nicole