a continuity of taste

Mary Ruefle describes a continuity of taste:

I was … reading, for the first and last time in my life, my own private journals, which I began writing when I was sixteen and ceased to write when I was forty. As is my habit, I was copying selected passages from the [poet I was also reading at the time] into a notebook. Later that evening I began reading a journal I kept twenty years ago. In it, I was reading the notebooks of the [same] poet … and had copied into the journal by hand my favorite passage, which was identical with the passage I had copied earlier in the day, believing completely that I had never encountered it before.

In my Best Poems posts I list all the poems I copied out in my own hand over the previous year. Have I have copied out the same poem more than once? There are two occasions I have copied out the same poem in different translation. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about reading over my personal anthology and coming across the same exact poem in English — only a handful of years separating the duplicates. How did I not remember? Surely, the poem seemed awfully familiar.

Not that this was a problem. I mean, I liked it. I’ve wondered occasionally if I would copy out some poem in my personal anthology if I were to come upon it all unseen. In that case, the answer was clearly yes. 

source: “Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World”

an essay by Mary Ruefle

The Planet on the Table: poets on the reading life

edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen

Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY