On the pleasure of reading private notebooks
substack.com
On the pleasure of reading private notebooks
“Notebooks achieve so much of what poetry tries to achieve, but organically—they begin and end arbitrarily, in medias res. Ready-made erasures with an offhand effortlessness, abstractions interspersed with specifics. Fragmentary profundity. No forced closures. The epiphanies fall where they may.”
“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I
... See more