literary junk-drawer

A junk-drawer where we save things we think may be of use to us sometime in the future, or in which we toss parts of things we intend to work on later. A commonplace book—one's literary junk-drawer.

composition or content

There are people who keep commonplace books for their compositional and calligraphic beauty. Other people will scrawl over the pages or paste in clippings askew, concerned only with the quality of the content they’ve captured.

notebook memory

Memory no match for a notebook at hand.

[Being a digital age, any 'notes app' could suffice.]

three lines away

One is always three lines away from getting it all said, once and for all.
-
Actually, I usually write about whatever swims into my mind. And since I’m always, unlike Heraclitus, sinking in some water, it’s usually the same fish that swim in—ghostfish, deathfish, firefish, whatever can rise to the top.
-
Unless you love the music of words, you are merely a pamphleteer.
-
I think the absence of people in my poems enhances their presence in the objects and the landscapes.
-
More often than not, the title is all a poem needs of narrative structure.
-
Poetry is an exile’s art. Anyone who writes it seriously, writes from an exile’s point of view.
-
We write approximations.

—Charles Wright, “Halflife: A commonplace notebook” in Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews 1977-87 (U. of Michigan Press, 1988)

spill into silence

Epigraph for a commonplace book: Pity those with prodigious memories, for they have no need to record the gems found when reading, and when their lives are over their mind troves will spill into silence.

quote from the blue

With quoted entries ranging from the obscure to the random, it was an ‘uncommonplace book’.

skim off the best

The poet skims off the best of life and puts it in his work. That’s why his work is beautiful and his life is bad.

—Leo Tolstoy

[A Writer’s Commonplace Book (Michael O’Mara Books Ltd., 2006), compiled and edited by Rosemary Friedman.]

all marked

The dream of a perfect commonplace book wherein each page might be marked or underlined as a place to return to.

pleasure reading

An hour won. Dryden’s Epistles read for pleasure September night windy, dark, warm, and I have read the Epistles of Dryden.

Reading these Epistles which have no connection with my work and little with my ideas, have given me a happy sense of my own leisure. Who has the necessary time and vacancy of mind to read Dryden’s Epistles for pleasure in 1927? or to copy out extracts from them into a Commonplace Book? Or to write out more often than is necessary the words: Dryden, Epistles, Dryden’s Epistles? No one but me and perhaps Siegfried Sassoon.

—E.M. Forster, Commonplace Book (Stanford U. Press, 1985), edited by Philip Gardner

commonplace book

The wondrous passages I can only dimly recall. For many years I trusted memory too much when reading. Now I write things down.

different readers, alternate lines

Reading his commonplace book, I discovered we had read many of the same books, yet lines he had chosen to quote I’d passed over without notice.