| Notes | I began assembling Notebooks as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s in primary school and continued through the 1970s by which time I had become a teacher, a lecturer, a taxi driver and a worker in a tin mine. Very little remains from this first collection of thirty years.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present time, 2010, I assembled a second and much more extensive collection of Notebooks from the humanities and the social sciences: quotations from my reading, photocopies from books, magazines and journals and, by the late nineties,resources from the Internet. Some of these notes were destroyed or given away when they seemed irrelevant to my future study, research and writing activities. Such a time arose when I retired in 1999 from FT teaching for the major cull of this thirty year period.
My poetry Notebooks contain the sorts of notes that come from observations and experience as well as from reading. I have also accummulated many notes from these sources and they are found in my journals/diaries. By 2010 my Notebooks were found in 300 two-ring binders, arch-lever files and plastic covered binders. They were filled with notes for more than 6600 poems as well as many subjects and disciplines: ancient history, modern history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, media studies, personal/creative writing, post-graduate studies, literature, poetry, Baha’i files on many topics, essay writing, autobiography and biography, miscellaneous, letters, inter alia. There is some material in these Notebooks going back to the 1950s and 1960s, the beginning of my Bahá'í and pioneering experience but, for the most part, the Notebooks gradually assumed the form they now have from 1980 to 2010 and especially after I retired from FT employment in 1999, PT work in 2003 and most volunteer activity in 2005. |
