g'day poetry geeks I'm Jackson and this is another poetry show in this poetry show we're going to be talking about the materials you need to be an excellent poet and whether you really need a moleskin to succeed okay so really the answer is pretty obvious it really doesn't matter what you write in to be a poet so that's the end of the video however there are some people who say quite adamantly that in order to be a real poet you have to write everything out by hand because that's how you have a more physical connection with what you've written you know like there's some artistic creative magic that happens when you're holding a pen in your hand as opposed to typing in a keyboard and there might be something in there there is some psychology behind the idea of things like embodied cognition where you and your mind works with the the physical experiences that you have so there could be something in that the idea that by using your hand to write something you're having to translate that language through your body and that may make some neural pathways and some neural connections that might spark off something a little bit more creative possibly I'm not saying that's definitely true it could just be kind of pseudo neuroscientific codswallop but some people were adamantly you need to write things down by hand other people find that actually just get into the zone a lot more quickly if they just type away at the keyboard most people tend to type a lot faster than they can write by hand and that means their thoughts can flow a little bit quicker a little bit a little bit more like real speech so I'm a little bit on the fence as to which one is the best for me personally it doesn't even come into it what's best for me what it comes down to is what is available if you can hear that little clicking sound by the way that's my dog walking around my ankles company for the video yeah sit down take a seat you can take a seat yeah good doggy so anyway for those people who are adamant that you have to write by hand write with whatever is available to you you don't need a fancy moleskin which some people believe they need because that's what Hemingway used you're not Hemingway but really just use whatever you've got to hand so it can be something cheap and nasty that you picked up from the supermarket it might be something small and compact that fits in a bag or in your pocket it might be something that's the same it might be something that has a little pen with it because that's handy to have you might have you know your little stationery fetishes where you go down to you know typo or some you know stationery shop and you buy you know a nice fancy one or you know you might have a nice big one like this kind of jot your ideas down in and again this one is a very kind of fancy expensive looking one with nice hardcover which obviously has a little bit more kind of creative magic in it but obviously all of that's nonsense because none of that really matters what really matters is that when inspiration hits you you've got something to write it down in you don't need this to be a writer what you need to be a writer is to have something to write with and something to write on on you at all times and I would even go so far as to say that even that's not true because what I tend to do when I'm out walking my dog for example and inspiration hits me like a lightning bolt as it often does because I'm a creative genius and I don't have a pen or anything on me I just open up my phone open up the recording voice recording app and I pretend I'm talking to people like I'm a high-powered businessman what I'm really doing is reciting my idea for my next wonderful poem into it while I'm walking and that way if anybody walks past me and they hear me they think that I must be you know trying to woo some you know unapproachable beautiful woman over the phone with these elegant lines of verse or they mind their own business which is what they should be doing so is it really that simple can we just say that it doesn't matter what you're writing as long as you've got something with you well yes and no the one other consideration you should think of and I'm lost and reminded of this when I read particular poets or even when I'm writing my own poetry sometimes you find that the the poem that you are writing and the lines that you're writing are actually constrained by the page and the type of book that you're writing in just to give you an example of that and if I was writing in this one for example which is a nice pocket-sized and little notebook with a pen it's got one of those you know open up and while it's in the back where you can put little notes of paper and stuff that's all very well and good but the reason I don't use that for all of my poetry writing most of the time is because the pages are so small and narrow I feel like my line lengths are constrained by the width of the page and you see that I think sometimes in some kind of greater known poets I'll take for example an Tennyson who we've got him up here and if you look at the work of Tennyson for example he was known well one of the things he's kind of known for one of the kind of important artifacts that we have that remained of Tennyson is this these butcher's books that you used to write his poetry in and he used to write his the history is a little bit murky on it some scholars kind of believe it was his later drafts that ended up in the butcher's book he didn't do his kind of first drafts in these but these butcher's books were these long thin books and that he would you know they basically used for kind of keeping accounts you know you know in an old shop and he would write his poems into these now because of that form of them being these long thin books his probably his most famous poem or his most you know renowned poem is the poem in memoriam which was a an elegy for the death of his friend Arthur Hallam but if we mix up nice and close for you you can see that he has these slightly shorter slightly shorter segments yes these very small stanzas just four line stanzas all the way through all these quite trains they follow this kind of usual this little rhyme scheme Ling has but I think in writing in such a sort of narrow long book he writes a narrow long poem and it goes on and on and on there are pages and pages and pages and this one is just an excerpt but very long a poem and it's a very thin poem and I think that's an interesting thing to consider how much of what he wrote was helped or or influenced by the the nature of the thing that he was writing him so I tend to find that I can't actually write a full long poem in something like this because I feel like I've never got enough room to really explore so when I'm writing my first drafts of anything the two books I kind of use more generally that this one for jotting down you know kind of brainstorming ideas and snatches of lines that kind of squeeze together because you've got more room in here to do that and then this one as well I just tend to write smaller but I do the same thing and a new idea behind that is basically if you've got room to write and you've got room to make mistakes then actually gives you a bit of flexibility and a bit of fluidity so I'm not saying you absolutely have to write on a big page as opposed to a small page but that is something to consider just in the back of your mind think what kind of effect does that kind of constraint of space have on you as a poet because it will have some influence and it's okay to be influenced as a poet everything influences us so it's important to understand where those influences come from whether they're working for you or against you and then taking appropriate measures to deal with that similarly with you know if you're writing all of your poems in Word documents or in notepad there are typographical and positioning things that happen and when you're writing and that are kind of dictated to you by the software that you're using so again you might think well do the constraints of that software stop you from expressing yourself in a particular way or do they help you express yourself in a different way so those are the kinds of things that you're keeping the back of your mind as well so on the one hand it seems like a very very straightforward answer to the question does it matter what materials you use do you need a particular type of pencil do you need a particular type of notebook do you need you know a particular type of software on your computer that you write your poems in that you know does whatever kind of a software a poetic magic might be out there does any of that stuff matter not really if you're gonna write you're gonna write and you can I often used to write on the back of bus tickets or receipts I had it in my pocket just whatever I had to hand I'd just stuff them all into my wallet I'd pull them out at a later date and I'd write them down in a proper notebook but you just write on whatever you've got but when you are composing something when you're putting together your ideas when you're trying to give them some shape and some structure you might want to think about the constraints that that page is placing on you and the influence that might have on you so I do have one moleskin by the way mole skin no mole skin or moles going who knows I do have one mole skin and I don't like to write any very much though because you know there's such beautiful things there's such beautiful pristine elegant pieces of I mean this is a work of art in itself so I don't feel like I come right in it and it also has this other quirk where if you whenever you open it to ride in it I mean that's just distracting so really I don't know what the deal is with these you're a good little girl many pins yeah you show me a bit you show me your belly you just sit there and don't be annoying