Sweet Theft: A Poet’s Commonplace Book

J.D. McClatchy, adjunct professor of English and editor of The Yale Review

(Counterpoint Press)

Centuries ago, when books were rare, those who owned them would lend them to friends, who in turn would copy out passages they especially liked before returning the book to its owner. These anthologies came to be known as Commonplace Books, and modern writers as different as W. H. Auden and Alec Guinness have kept them as well, recording phrases or passages that struck them as wise or witty or quirky. The result is as much the self-portrait of a sensibility as it is a collection of miscellaneous delights. J. D. McClatchy has been keeping such a book for three decades now. This selection from it offers a unique look into what strange facts, what turns of mind or phrase, what feats of language and nature can attract the attention of a poet.

The book offers selections from Nietzsche and Flaubert, Dizzy Gillespie and Marianne Moore, among others. Henry James speaks of Venice as: “The deposed, the defeated, the disenchanted, the wounded, or even only the bored, have seemed to find there something that no other place could give.” Groucho Marx writes of an evening at the theatre: “I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse circumstances — the curtain was up.” Many of McClatchy’s own observations about the art and prowess of writing are included as well.