If you keep a journal, you tend to be interested in how others do it. The poet William Stafford left a partial inventory of the contents of his. It included:
• Odd things, like the things you’d find in a button drawer.
• Evidence to hang him by.
• Clues that lead nowhere.
• Deliberate obfuscation, the kind that takes genius.
• Chasms of character.
Someday, I might find a better description of what a journal’s about. For now, that’s the flag that still waves.
• Source: William Stafford, The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems; Minneapolis, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998, p. 248.
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