A New Way of Writing

Several mornings in the week, I take the dog to a place where I can let him wander about without danger, and I sit down on a rock or a low stone wall and write in a big fat notebook I bought in CVS or Staples on a trip to America. The dog wanders around, comes back to check on me every now and then, and finally loses patience and starts nudging me with his nose: enough writing, take me home.
I have been attending a poetry workshop for the past year or so. I began attending with a lot of misgivings and have become a convert. The teacher, Jennie Feldman, is a fine poet herself and an excellent, low key discussion leader. Gently she guides us in the direction she wants. The group, mainly women (of course), is otherwise quite diverse, in taste, in literary experience, and in goals. Parenthetically, in my musical activities, I am involved almost exclusively with men, but in my ceramics and poetry groups, I'm almost exclusively with women.
But when I write in the notebook in the morning, I don't try to write poems, though sometimes a poem does grow out of what I write. Nevertheless, I do write in separate lines, as if I were writing poetry.
When you write a phrase on one line,
And the next one on the next line,
You can see your sentences take shape,
Because, after all, it's the shape
Of your sentences
(Metaphorcially, of course)
That makes your writing what it is,
And it helps with word choice too,
Because you can see and hear the words better,
When they're sitting in broken lines.
And it's easier to revise your work.
As for writing in the notebook, my guiding ideas are twofold: first, making a moment in the day to write is a way of taking the thoughts that otherwise flit through my mind and disappear and making them sit still for a moment, so I can examine them; and, second, catching the thoughts on paper ought to give me raw material for more consequential writing later in the day, or later in my life.