I was reading on writer Pip Lincolne’s delightful Wallflower Cordial the other day about her beginning a commonplace book. Then I remembered I had something similar, although I hadn’t realised it was a commonplace book.
I called mine ‘The Brilliance of Others’. On the cover is a somewhat gloomy photograph of the reading chair of someone famous. (I didn’t record who so if you recognise it–let me know.)
On the inside cover it says, “Personal Poetry Anthology: words by other people that move, stimulate, excite…& at the back, quotations.”
I guess I hadn’t heard of commonplace books then because that would have been a much more succinct title.
I started it in April 2004 which was around when I became pregnant with my second child, Magnus. I guess that is why, after over twenty years, it is only half-way full. Nine months later, a decades-spanning distraction was born.
Still, from time to time, I remember it exists and I add something. There are currently 51 entries.
In it there are poems I’ve copied by hand from library books, some snipped out of the New Yorker (now yellowing…that New Yorker paper doesn’t age well), or printed out. From time to time I subscribed to the Academy of American Poets ‘Poem a Day’ emails and I would print out the ones I particularly liked.
(I’ve subscribed to this so many times over the years…usually when I feel like I’m not reading enough new poetry and I should make more of an effort to ‘keep up’…but a poem every day to your in-box is so many poems! & so many emails. Therefore I usually only last a month or two and then unsubscribe again after getting overwhelmed. It turns out even poets can be exposed to too much poetry.)
(Above: This Merwin poem on brittle, yellowing New Yorker paper still gets me in the gut. What an ambiguous, radiant, brutal final stanza.)
There’s also the occasional dashed-down note which must have seemed very relevant to something I was thinking about or working on at the time and now I have no clue why. Thus:
According to USA lifestyle magazine The Good Trade, commonplace books are increasing in popularity again. Younger people are enjoying them as a kind of palate-cleansing, analogue and slow antidote to the relentlessness of social media. I totally approve of this trend.
Do you have a commonplace book or something like it?
Here’s a quote I wrote down from G.K.Chesterton. Why younger me liked it so much, I’m not sure…possibly the poetry in the final eight words?
“He discovered the fact that all romantics know–that adventures happen on dull days and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight then it breaks with a sound like a song.”
Helen Lehndorf 