For many, many years, I did not use pen and ink to write. For most of my life I have written poems– I wrote the first in 1963. It was a love poem, heavily influenced by e.e. cummings and the hopelessness of falling for a girl–Jean was her name– who could not have had the least idea I loved her from a far. Reality, however, was never a big issue for me, and my instinct was to pour my feelings like hot mercury into the keys of a Smith Corona portable typewriter. This writing instrument was an easy selection. A typewriter was a machine, and I stripped mine down and added paint like Matt Testeroni’s gold and silver 1948 Hudson. Matt was 17 when he graduated from grammar school and having spent two years in every grade he was a shining example of what pen and ink was suited for, which was to tattoo the name of every girl he’d done it with on one or the other biceps using a sharpened Higgins pen and a bottle of India ink. Maybe pen and ink made his arms a declaration of independence, but it was the machinery of sex that sped along and thus seemed best-suited to acts expressed in writing.

        Although Matt’s car was a familiar, mass produced and impersonal machine that traveled public highways, the kernel of the machine was private, intimate, so that all the gauges and dials, the wheels and levers and chromium indicated the speed of experience itself. So when it came time for the leap from the labyrinth of feelings to a declaration of love, I saw in my typewriter a public chariot with highly personal purposes.

        For most of my adult life it remained that way until some years ago I discovered slowness. My father had died; he’d returned in a dream, briefly. I was driving him in a taxi cab, and when I asked him where to, he said the river. We got there so fast it was only dawning on me it was Dad when I had to let him out so he could get to the river. Well, thanks, he said, I’ll see you later. But wait, I said, how will I reach you? He turned around a second and said, Oh for that you need the right pen.

Poet Rolly Kent
        I began to look for the right pen, because when your father visits like that, you ought to listen. What an odd act writing turns out to be, when you slow down to let words come at a more autumnal pace...I find that for me (I make no claims to universality) the fountain pen, with its demand for slowing things down, is what I turn to first thing in the morning or when I take notes.

( I do keep a blank book going but only for notes and ideas or images, seldom for anything like a journal of my inner world and usually it takes a year to fill all the pages). For myself, the keyboard is more abstract than the pen, it is less of a thing, more ephemeral and shifty. I use an Omas and I popped for the celluloid because there is something rather alive about this plastic. It not only looks great, and feels great, but there’s something wonderfully dangerous about knowing this blue celluloid pen started off in a pizza oven in Bologna and had to be cooked for almost a year to kill it and make it lie still and not twist or explode in your hand.

There’s something more mortal about a fountain pen, then, at least the kind I like. Since I have surrendered to slowness, I like a very fine point so I can be exact. I dislike the smooshiness of a wide-open-throttled nib. There is the ritual of matching the sort ink flow I like to the kind of paper (smooth and thick), and of course, the right color ink which must glide (I love the colors of Herbin ink but they are just too thin for the fine points I use). It’s a fussy process, but if I am going to take the trouble to say something with wet ink, and make a record of it on nice paper, and use up a lot of time doing it, I am going to be spending some time in a world of solid objects. It is a more elemental situation than writing by keyboard on a screen where you can blab on and on and spell check and rewrite and cut and paste. That’s what I need when I have, so to speak, built up a bonfire and the blaze is really roaring along.

        Writing by pen and ink is a kindling process; it’s small, it’s fundamental, intimate, private. There’s a wonderful secrecy to it, like someone on a frozen lake, building a little fire by blowing on twigs and leaves. You see the trace of your breath and it is very quiet. Then you hear the water flowing beneath the water you are kneeling on, water beneath your knees, the same water that has for the time become hard enough to hold you up. You bend down and get your lips right next to the sticks and the fire and the ice.