09/13/2025
In the late spring, I picked up “Poetry Against All: A Diary” by Johannes Göransson. I promptly got depressed—my free-writing is so mundane in comparison: whiny, self-absorbed, repetitive.
It made me wonder what my journaling *could* be— more argumentative, more observational, and, with a move completely to paper, messier perhaps? What if the journal is the “real” writing? I’ve always treated it as a pre-cursor, practice, and not in itself as deep work. Why?
With those questions, I am exploring different models of journaling as my fall reading focus. Most of my books are still in storage after the fire, so I only found three possible examples at home— but no true journals.
I have “The Herbarium” from the Moulton edition of the Lewis & Clark Journals— plates of plants, so useless. If someone wants to buy it, let me know— it’s a relic of a long-dead interest.
“Lucian Freud’s Sketchbooks” is mostly plates too with the materiality of paper as object, so beautiful. I enjoy when we do this in our books— “Twelve Saints” collages, ’s palette in “Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts,” “Ensō” with its fabric, paper, even a Viewfinder disc. It’s in both our next books as well.
Evidently, Freud would pick up any sketchbook lying around, so it’s impossible to trace artistic development. Would randomness be fun? I got sucked into a YouTube video of a lady extolling the spiritual benefits of junk journaling and I suppose in the randomness—maybe something Freud was going for—you find new connections or direction.
The only other book that came to mind—local writer “Fugitive Assemblage” ()— also not a journal, but written in journal-like entries, incorporating fragments of archive to add dissonance and consonance to the piece. It feels like that to me— less a book than a piece. Interesting, because if my journaling has been simplistic note-taking— “I did this & felt that”—how might inviting disjunction or even archive add counterpoint to the satisfaction that comes from linear remembrance?
With so few models in the house, I then went to ...
