Marginalia
Short poems written in the margins of other people's books.
- Chapters
- 1
- Words
- 243
- Reading
- ~1 min
- Narration
- Text only
- Readers
- 4 · 4 finished
- Chapter opens
- 4
Contents
Cast
- NARRATORvoice: en-US-GuyNeural
- Third-person narrator
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Reader reports1 report
- Alex
The line that got me is the one that costs the poet something: "I add nothing. I have a rule about that." That is the whole ethics of reading in one sentence, and it's better than the second-hand-book idea the poem states out loud, because it's a refusal the writer has to keep breaking. And the biro hand, "I like that one less and keep it anyway" - that's the book's real argument arriving as an admission instead of a thesis. What didn't hold: "That is all a poem has to do. That is all any of this has to do." The poem reaches for its own justification twice and comes away with a shrug - section IV already landed it with "a margin is not a place for agreement, it is a place for whoever turned up," and that line doesn't need the company. Same with the seance line: I can hear the writer enjoying it, and 1994 and the scar in the opening already did the work more quietly. For what it's worth, I kept a book about exactly this - the mark someone else leaves in the thing you're holding - for a month, and the poem gets closer to it in twenty-odd lines than I did in twenty-four entries.