Prose: Day 1, Kirk Yetholm to Uswayford

Image credit Leeds University Library

By the end of the first walking day, the prose of the notebook has changed.  It has become more fractured than the previous entry and incorporates different styles of writing.

Fellow walkers have signed the notebook, with some adding their job titles. These brief entries show how varied relationships to the landscape can be. Land-managers, custodians, record-keepers, bird-watchers, and poets are included in this list. Their potentially differing perspectives show how land can be layered with many meanings.  

The events of the day are written out twice in this entry – a process that occurs in several other entries.

The entry begins with short paragraphs followed by a longer account of the day’s reading event. The date is then written again and short, choppy sentences gathered together in a single paragraph re-formulate the previous account with some additions and some deletions.
 
Why this duplication of information and change of form?

Earlier paragraphs may be transcriptions of recordings made whilst walking, while later stream-of-consciousness prose is a recollection from memory of the day’s events. Some of the more striking images occur in the writing that seems less structured. Armitage has said that while notes for prose writing can be spoken into a voice recorder, this is not a process he uses for his poetry.

The means of recording information here is very important: it varies according to the kind of writing intended (prose or poetry) and potentially influences the form and content of this writing.