Give me a notebook any day of the week
A pad and pen
I know the world has moved on without me
(It always does, doesn’t it?)
To computers, “wordpads”
Palm Pilots and digital recording piles of crap that cost too much
Have you ever known a rich poet?
Born rich?
No.
You can’t write about pleasure if you haven’t known pain
And you can’t write a decent piece of poetry on a computer
Unless you have once been poor enough to not afford one
So, give me a notebook any day of the week
A good, solid notebook, with a lot of pages, college-ruled to save space
Well-built, so it won’t fall apart
Because some of us don’t have soft, nice, safe places to live
And our notebooks might suffer a little damage
Still, it’s a notebook
It’s physical
You can hold it
Perhaps ironically, just four months later I bought my first real desktop computer. Though I continued to occasionally write poetry on paper, most of my post-2000 poems were composed or at least polished on the computer. Also, I almost ceased writing poetry entirely, at least until 2014.