dublinka

I've spent the morning devouring, The Poet's Notebook, a collection of excerpts from the notebooks of 26 American poets. It makes for fascinating reading, throwing one disconnected thought after another at you. Observations, ideas, trivia, quotations - you name it - this books is laden with a gloriously obscene melange of writing, which fires your critical and poetic faculties, so much so that you find yourself increasingly rewriting in your mind whole pages of it in original ways. If you've ever felt that the notebooks you keep are crashed cars of thoughts, then you'll find you're not alone. It is a triumph of the incidental over the structured; a dreamlike subconscious, where thoughts are in the process of being sculpted into language - and, as is often the case, broken and smashed on the page. Published in 1995, and available for next to nothing second hand, I have the feeling it is destined to become a cult classic.