Upstate: A North American Journal

Upstate is the journal of poet and lecturer Jeremy Hookers time spent in North America during the academic year 1994-5. Like his earlier Welsh Journal (Seren 2001) which covered his first sojourn in Wales in the 1970s the book muses on his time as an Englishman in a foreign land - albeit a land with which he feels deep ties both personal and literary. As the author says in his introduction: Keeping a journal is a means of seeing in the dark and the dark always advances. ...I have no interest in confession although I am aware that my very selectivity - and every journal entry is a selection from countless possible impressions - is a form of self-revelation...The one thing a diarist must never do is perform for an audience even if the audience is only himself or herself. At best I have found my journal a means of escaping from self-consciousness since it is not about the ego in isolation but about relationships between the seer and the seen between self and other. If it is about finding oneself it is about finding oneself in the world neither of which is separable from the other.It will be evident from the foregoing that I understand keeping a journal as analogous to writing poetry. It is not the same but there are analogies. Each is about making a shape in words - a literary journal rarely consists of raw notations; its aim is to find the right word or image to form the corresponding shape for an impression or thought. In my case too the journal has sometimes served me as a quarry of poetic materials as well as a way of thinking about poetry. Jeremy Hooker was born in 1941 and is a poet critic teacher and broadcaster. The most recent of his elevel poetry collections was a Collected Poems The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965-2005 (Enitharmon 2006). He is Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan.