Since the late 1960s, I’ve relied on my dark red Winsor and Newton BK 34 sketchbooks to work out my ideas in the studio and to document my emerging social and political consciousness. An excerpt of my journals published in The Paris Review Daily, highlights my formative friendships with many of the poets around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, including Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman and Kenward Elmslie. These early supporters of my work invited me to make announcements for poetry readings, mimeographed chapbook covers, and later, book-length collaborations. Here, I chronicle my life as part of this vibrant social scene and the end of my romance with Ted Berrigan in 1970.