I’ve done just enough archival work to be fascinated by poets’ commonplace books. It’s been more than a decade since I worked among Marianne Moore’s papers at the Rosenbach, but I was impressed by her fantastically crabbed hand in a series of tiny notebooks, recording quotations she liked. At the Library of Congress, you can leaf through Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sparser notes, mixing drafts, travel plans, and lists of poems that might go together in her next collection. And how I wish Anne Spencer had kept notebooks! Instead, I learned last summer how hard it is to date any of her drafts, many of which must be lost in any case, because she penciled ideas on any scrap of paper or cardboard within reach.
I’m more organized that Spencer, but not by much (you can see one physical notebook
I kept here, and read a reflection about it here). If the internet ever disappears, much of my “archive” will go with it, not that I really expect anyone to care. This blog is the closest I come to an intellectual/ artistic journal, supplemented by Facebook posts. They’re all personal, although I’m performing and curating a version of myself: in these media, I’m honest, but not always intimate. My poetry and creative nonfiction feel much closer to the bone–riskier.
The space that feels most like a commonplace book for me is, of all places, Twitter. Like many other writers, some of whom the future will actually care about, I occasionally jot lines there from whatever I’m reading, or tweet links or photographs of pages. I like following what other poets are reading, too. I suspect if you peruse a year’s worth of some authors’ tweets, you’d only get a partial sense of the media they’re consuming, but that’s true of my 2017 list of books below, too (kept in Word). I can’t keep similar track, after all, of the vast number of posts and essays and magazines and portions of anthologies I read, much less the Netflix series and SNL clips I watch or the paintings I gaze at. It’s just too much. I’m a hungry art-consumer!
So, belatedly, here is my very partial new year’s account of myself as a book-reader. I gave the sf highlights in a Strange Horizons’ summary review. In addition to those, I liked Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s first book, Ornament, enough to teach it in a poetry and music class this winter. I was excited by and admiring of all the poetry collections that made the most prestigious year-end lists, but I’d add that David Wojahn’s 2017 collection, For the Scribe, was just as strong as the ones receiving fizzier receptions. Among slightly older collections, Majmudar’s Dothead and Miller’s The Cartographer Maps a Way to Zion were new to me last year, and I loved them. Among nonfiction books, Tisserand’s Krazy probably had the biggest influence on me, and aside the more sf-y novels by Saunders, Hamid, Jones, and others I mention in Strange Horizons, I greatly enjoyed the latest mystery from Livesey, Mercury. Between submitting the review and New Year’s Day, I also finally read Alderman’s The Power, which both riveted and irritated me. It’s definitely a book to talk about. “Chewy,” as reviewers keep writing.
For future record, or for naught (if I remain obscure, or if 45 presses his really big nuclear button and civilization collapses, taking the internet down with it):
POETRY
1/3 Kaufman, Krawiec, Levin, Parker, eds, Intimacy* (teaching possibility)
1/15 Briante, The Market Wonders* (reread for class)
1/22 Blanco, Looking for the Gulf Motel (reread for class)
1/24 Sexton, Transformations (reread for class)
2/5 Camille Rankine, Incorrect Merciful Impulses* (micro-review)
2/7 Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (reread for class)
2/12 Etter, Scar (reread for class)
2/19 Hankla, Great Bear (by local author I admire)
2/21 Evans, Superheroes and Villanelles* (traded books at AWP)
2/25 Shire, Our Men Do Not Belong to Us (reread for class)
2/26 Smith, Life on Mars (reread for class)
3/3 Carson, Autobiography of Red (reread for class)
3/3 Givhan, Landscape with Headless Mama (scouting for teaching)*
3/20 Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec (reread for class)
3/24 Vuong, Night Sky as Exit Wound (reread for class)*
4/3 Michelson, Swimming Through Fire (by friend; reread 12/4 for teaching)*
4/8 Hogue, In June the Labyrinth (by friend)*
4/? Satterfield, Apocalypse Mix (by friend)*
4/? Brown, The Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded (recommended by friends)*
4/30 Sevick, Lion Brothers (local author)*
5/? Campbell, First Nights* (for review; reread 12/3 for teaching)
5/18 Borzutsky, Performance of Becoming Human (Prize winner)*
5/29 Friman, The View From Saturn (bought at conference)
7/6 Dwarf Stars Anthology 2017 (to vote on winners)
7/18 Rauk, Buried Choirs* (comp copy from press I ended up reviewing)
7/19 Willoughby, Beautiful Zero (gift)
7/20 Anderson, Rough (unpublished, to give feedback)
7/29 Wojahn, For the Scribe* (poet I admire)
7/29 Phillips Bell, Ornament* (by a friend)
7/30 Majmudar, Dothead* (heard NPR piece & bought book ages before)
7/31 Campana, The Book of Faces (research)
8/1 Campana, Natural Selections (research)
8/20 Stewart, Cinder* (research)
9/4 Bashir, Field Theories* (research)
9/29 Taesali, Sourcing Siapo* (review)
10/13 H.D., Trilogy (reread for class)
10/24 Pollard, Outsiders* (by a friend)
11/5 Forche, The Country Between Us (for class)
11/7 Michelson, ed, Dreaming America* (by friend and colleague)
11/21 Cooley, Girl after Girl after Girl* (review)
11/25 Smith, Don’t’ Call Us Dead* (in response to reviews)
12/19 Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf* (good reviews)
12/21 Long Soldier, Whereas* (daughter gave it to me)
12/24 Der Vang, Afterland* (NBA list)
12/31 McCrae, The Language of my Captors* (NBA list)
FICTION
1/2 Whitehead, Underground Railroad* (good critical attention/ year-end lists)
1/14 Muth, Zen Shorts (gift from a colleague)
2/4 Gonzalez, The Regional Office Is Under Attack* (Christmas present)
3/5 Goldstein, The Oven (scouting for teaching)
3/6 Gaiman, Norse Gods (for fun)
3/7 French, The Ticking (scouting for teaching)
3/11 Hamid, Exit West* (scouting for teaching)
3/26 Butler, Duffy, Jennings, graphic adaptation of Kindred (scouting for class)*
3/30 Zoboi, American Street (scouting for class)*
4/8 Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo* (fan of his work)
4/18 Livesey, Mercury* (heard at the AWP)
4/23 Kidd, Himself* (reviewed well by author I admire)
5/20 Strout, Anything Is Possible (audiobook on car trips)
5/26 Robinson, New York 2140 (always read his books)*
6/10 Gavaler, Kill the Messenger (unpublished, to give feedback)
6/16 Rash, The Cove (people had been recommending his work for a while)
7/13 Herriman, The Kat Who Walked in Beauty (research)
7/14 Yuknavich, Book of Joan* (good reviews)
7/16 Croy Barker, How To Talk to a Goddess (unpublished, to give feedback)
7/23 Perry, The Essex Serpent* (NYT Times review, I think)
7/27 Gowdy, Little Sister* (NYT review)
8/6 Atkinson, Life After Life (recent classic I’d never gotten to)
8/13 Mandel, Last Night in Montreal (for research)
8/14 Dickinson, Poison Oracle (fan of his work and Small Beer Press)
10/1 Jemisin, The Stone Sky* (for fun)
10/8 Mandel, The Singer’s Gun (for research)
10/15 Mandel, The Lola Quartet (for research)
10/21 Mandel, Station Eleven (reread for teaching/ research)
11/8 Egan, Visit from the Goon Squad (reputation)
12/1 Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God* (for fun)
12/22 Hoffman, Rules of Magic* (for fun)
12/31 Alderman, The Power* (reviews)
NONFICTION
1/24 Culler, Literary Theory (reread for class)
2/18 Smith, Ordinary Light* (I love her poetry)
3/10 Rekdal, Intimate (I heard her give a great AWP reading)
6/24 Tisserand, Krazy* (research project)
6/30 McDowell, O’Connell, de Havenon, Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman (research)
7/5 Gailey, PR for Poets (in ms, to give feedback)
7/17 Vetter, A Curious Peril: H.D.’s Late Modernist Prose (research)
7/28 Greene, Time’s Unfading Garden (reread for research)
8/09 Frank, Diary of a Young Girl (rereading because I was in Amsterdam)
8/18 Stewart, A Poet’s Freedom (research)
8/19 Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (reread for research)
9/2 Allen, Our Declaration (first-year reading program)
10/19 Bialosky, Poetry Will Save Your Life* (research)
11/2 Leahy, Tumor* (gift, also by a colleague)
12/2 Sulak and Kolosov, Family Resemblance anthology (research and teaching)
12/23 Johnston, My Life As a Border Collie (by friend)
LESLEY WHEELER 