Commonplaces

‘This handful of poems is almost arbitrarily drawn from the Borgesian, idiosyncratic anthology that anyone who lives by words will come to carry’. Jane Hirshfield

I’m thinking of this blog as a kind of personal anthology, but also as a sort of commonplace book. ‘Commonplaces’ were familiar in the Renaissance and the nineteenth century; scrapbooks of sayings, quotations, enthusiasms, whatever caught the eye. Records of self-education.

W.H.Auden published his, ‘A Certain World’, in 1971. Some of it is fascinating, some puzzling (‘Why did he choose this?’), all of it interesting (if Auden interests you). He calls it, in his introduction, ‘a map of my planet’. Like traditional commonplace books, his contains everything and anything.

I’ll confine myself to poetry. The blog will be, I hope, a place to keep snippets from all the stuff that comes my way and seems worth keeping; poems, articles, criticism. I enjoy the process of choosing excerpts, picking out quotations. It sharpens my sense of what’s worth remembering, what’s worth passing on.

‘It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about’. G.K.Chesterton (quoted by Auden)