Tapa Notebooks

Note on using the tapa notebook

When I was presented with the tapa notebook, I felt very privileged, but I was unsure how to take advantage of it, because my writing is very computer based. I rarely write poems by hand and prefer to see them type-written. In addition, much of my work is created for new media or performance collaborations. I do use notebooks for making notes when I am not at the computer, but usually only for preliminary scribbles.

In the end I decided to take a variety of different approaches to filling the notebook. These would mediate between page and screen. I took screenshots of some of my new media work and pasted them into the book. I thought it would be instructive to see how the screenshots would look on the page, torn from their original context: some of these works are very kinetic, and in the screenshots you can see the words captured rolling off the screen. I also added a mixture of poems both handwritten and typewritten: some of these are rough drafts or fragments, some are complete.

My sense of the opportunities the tapa notebook afforded grew sharply as I filled it up. I interspersed the poems and screenshots with reflections about the process of deciding how to use the notebook, documenting my uncertainties, discoveries and delight.

Biog

Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. She is author of The Writing Experiment: strategiesfor innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, 2005 and Hyperscapes in thePoetry of Frank O'Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000. She is co-author of Improvisation, Hypermedia And The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997 and co-editor with Roger Dean of Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2009. She is currently writing a book on the contemporary literature-music relationship that will be published by Routledge in 2016. She is co-editor with Roger Dean of soundsRite, a journal of new media writing and sound, based at the University of Western Sydney.

Hazel is a poet, performer and new media artist, and has published three volumes of poetry, three CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia works. The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, a volume of creative work with accompanying CD Rom, was published by Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii, 2008, and a new volume of poetry will be published by Giramondo Publishing in Sydney in 2015. She is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and multimedia arts group, and has performed her work extensively in US, Europe, UK and Australasia. She also had a previous career as a professional violinist. Her website is at www.australysis.com

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Last updated 10 April, 2015