The Poet's Notebook
The Poet’s Notebook
by Noreen Ocampo
Sticky Notes is a column by Noreen Ocampo, who very much wants to say: Hi, welcome back to my channel! While I can’t provide perfectly cinematic color-grading or lofi beats in the background, I’d like to offer you an amalgamation of the happier dust collecting in my notes app. This column is an attempt at practicing gratitude, learning optimism, and formally asking the universe to allow me at least one nice thought to share with you all each month. And since I am a writer (but unfortunately not also a Youtuber), I’m sure there will be some literary discussion along the way. Let’s get started.
During my first week of keeping a poet’s notebook, I wrote:
I pulled the High Priestess from my tarot deck, and she told me to be patient. I acted anyway.
The melatonin bottle said to take one tablet 20-30 minutes before bed. Sharon sent me a website that instructed two hours before instead. I stayed up all night.
Frozen vegan wings are simply wing-shaped nuggets
The croissants my parents buy keep increasing in size
Making lists has always been a comforting ritual for me. I like to keep track of what books and films I read and watch when I manage to, what projects I start and finish and when. I often rewrite lists of future goals to remind myself of progress I want to make, and even as I worry about how quickly to-do lists can grow and how dauntingly they can demand, I find comfort in knowing where I’m (supposed to be) going.
This semester, a professor introduced me to a new kind of list, telling my poetry class that we would be keeping a “poet’s notebook” to collect any ideas that captivate, confuse, or otherwise catch our attention each week. In doing so, she said, we would build a rich “compost” to draw from and inspire our work.
A to-do list from January 2020, titled “TO DO LIST aka THINGS THAT ARE PREVENTING ME FROM WRITING”
That same week, a poem that found me began:
My friends sit on my shoulders as I search
for shooting stars, our bodies tumbling
into the grass like children. The high priestess
watches from her pillars, scowling
Since about January 2019, I’ve tried to maintain lists of at least one good memory each day, both as a means to preserve the lighter ones that may escape me and as a challenge to find something worth remembering even during the times I’d prefer to forget. On January 1, 2020, I celebrated “the experience of being at the movie theater.” On August 9, 2020, I congratulated myself on a poem acceptance I had really wanted. No matter how much time has passed, I can return to these favorite memories and relive being with friends I haven’t seen in a while or the excitement of receiving good news.
A friend once called me “visually particular” because of my constant urge to make things more beautiful. Although I identify with this description, I am beginning to realize that there are more negative drawbacks of leaning into my film major than taking an above-average amount of time to compose photos. As I look back to particularly difficult months where I seemed to have forgotten or been unable to add to my running list of good memories, I regret that I remember nothing of these time periods because I refused to document memories that weren’t particularly beautiful.
In the case of my poem above as well, in my attempt to translate the bullet point from my notebook into something more “poetic,” I lose the simple humor of the original statement — and it turns out I prefer the original after all. I’ll have to keep this in mind when I finally write about the vegan wings and ever-growing croissants. Who’s to say that they aren’t poetic enough as is?
An empty list from March 2020 and a humble single film watched (À propos de Nice) and book read (Conjuring Women)
The next week brought an unexpected focus on animals to my notebook. My list read:
A 4am message I wasn’t awake to see: “You know that spastic squirrel from those Ice Age movies? I feel like him sometimes”
Orange juice is the same shade of yellow as the typical rubber duck
The unforgettable image of a single ant drinking my coffee and the even more unforgettable image of my empty mug infested with ants
Mysteriously purpled toes (potentially ant-related)
Because I came back to poetry only last year after not having written much for a while, I often fear that every poem I write will be the last one. Maybe I’ll forget how to write. Maybe ideas will stop coming to me. Maybe I’ll write about everything I know, and then there will be nothing left. So every poem needs to be the best poem yet, I’ll tell myself, because this might be the last one.
If I had to set a thesis for this piece, it’d be: I am learning not to worry so much. Which is not to say that I’ve escaped my perfectionistic streak or pessimistic tendencies — or imply that I ever will — but if my poet’s notebook is teaching me anything, it’s that “beautiful” things are also often simple and unexpected and that there always will be new things to catch my eye each week. And sometimes, when I’m lucky, these new things may give way to a poem, too.
A collection of teabags from February 2020
I spent a lot of time thinking about my orange juice revelation and wrote:
I want to be a duck at the park,
waiting. You know those signs that
warn us not to feed birds? I thought it was because
they’d unlearn how to feed themselves,
but apparently our bread scraps could make them learn
aggression. I’d be an aggressive duck, waiting.
for the COUNTERCLOCK blog team: thank you so much for always embracing my whimsies
Noreen Ocampo is a Filipina American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Taco Bell Quarterly, Hobart, and HAD, among others, and she was also a music fellow in the 2019 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. She studies English, film, and media at Emory University.