NovPoWriMo 2025: Day 7 — Marginalia Poetry

DAY 7. Marginalia Poetry

Marginalia are the notes, arrows, grumbles, doodles, and side-whispers readers leave in the edges of a text. In medieval manuscripts, scribes glossed, quibbled, even sketched snails doing battle in the borders while scripture marched down the center; the margins became a parallel drama. Later readers think Coleridge’s dense annotations, David Foster Wallace’s hyperactive underlinings, classroom copies with five owners turned books into conversations layered over time. Billy Collins’s poem “Marginalia” catalogs this readerly graffiti; entire editions of “author’s marginalia” exist because the commentary sometimes outlives the text. And, there are some great, genuinely “underground” cases where the main text is prose and the poetry lives in the margins (or rides the edges of a prose book):

– “Pangur Bán” (9th c.): A short Old Irish poem written by a monk about his cat, copied into the margin of a Latin primer (the Reichenau Primer). The prose core is devotional/educational Latin; the lyric lives in the edge space. It is a classic proof-of-concept for marginal poetry.

– “The Blackbird of Belfast Lough / Loch Laíg” (early Irish): Another tiny Old Irish lyric scribbled as marginal verse by a scribe taking a break from copying ecclesiastical prose. It is frequently cited as an example of Irish marginal nature-poems alongside Pangur.

– Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1966–2016): Phillips “treated” a Victorian prose novel (A Human Document) by painting, collaging, and extracting poem-lines in little islands and margins of the page. The original prose remains the substrate; the poetry is literally carved into the borders/whitespace. It’s the modern, maximal version of marginal lyric.

– Here's a near-inverse for context (useful as a counterpoint in our Day 7). Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1817 ed.) where the center is verse and the margins carry a prose gloss (so, flipped), but it’s a powerful example of how margins become a second voice/story. Handy while we understand why margins have such poetic charge.

And of course, the cult novel S. (2013), conceived by J.J. Abrams and written by Doug Dorst, takes the idea of marginalia to its limit: the book itself is layered with two readers’ handwritten notes in the margins, postcards, maps, and slips of paper, so the story is told as much in the scribbles as in the “main text.” There are stranger rabbit holes too:

– The Voynich Manuscript (15th c.), an undeciphered book covered not just in mysterious text and drawings but with later readers’ puzzled notes trying to crack it.
– Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), a Renaissance dream-book where marginal glosses sometimes contradict the text and scholars suspect secret authorship games.
– The “Dartmouth Dante” copies from the 19th c., where anonymous students scrawled jokes, prayers, and insults in Latin beside their assigned cantos.
– And the Ars Notoria, a medieval grimoire, often copied with cramped side-notes that supposedly gave the scribe magical power if read aloud.

Why are we doing this? Because the margin is where thinking shows its work. It’s where the raw voice: contradictions, edits, hesitations; escapes the clean surface. A marginalia poem lets your poem be the commentary: restless, argumentative, alive. It also echoes your Week 1 themes (palimpsests, errata/corrigenda): we’re writing next to a text, not erasing it, by layering, correcting, complicating.

How can we do this?
Take a short passage (a paragraph from a book/article, a past poem of yours, even your own Day 1–6 lines). Copy it plainly as “main text.” Now write only in the margins: side notes, arrows, strike-throughs, caret insertions, contradictions, tiny glosses. The poem is the marginalia; the “main text” remains as ghost or foil.
– Minimum 8 lines of marginal notes.
– Include at least one “angry correction” (e.g., no—this isn’t it).
– Include at least one doodle-word (onomatopoeia, glyph, or nonsense syllable).
– End with a note-to-self (a private instruction or reminder).

Optional intensifiers (choose one or more):

• Let one margin note spill into (overwrite) the main text.
• Use editing marks (→ ↑ ↓ ^) and a visible strike-through.
• Make the marginalia argue with the central passage’s thesis.
• Write the whole thing as if you’re grading in red pen (brief rubrics, “awk,” “clarify”).
• Add one footnote number and a single-line footnote at the end (a sly reveal).

Micro-samples [Use as a feel-check or a template!]

(Main text:) The leaves fell in silence across the field.
[marginalia:] silence? — it was never quiet
[↑ add] the crows, the rust in their throats
strike “field” → write “vacant lot”
!!! autumn is not your metaphor; it is your mess
(why pretend the fence wasn’t there?)
[nnngh] skrr—skrr—(rake teeth on gravel)
^ move “fell” later; let them hover first
no, not “gold”—tobacco, old envelope, bruise-edge
[note to self:] remember: you were there too.

(Main text:) I meant to say I was fine.
[marginalia:] you meant to say—different from meaning it
→ insert: after the bus left
delete “fine”; set “functional”
(angry correction) stop tidying the wreckage
[scribble] o o o o (beads you kept worrying)
footnote¹

¹ you did not call back; that is the whole weather.

Food for thought for all of us: In the modern era, especially during the heyday of long-form blogging, comments, pingbacks, trackbacks, threaded replies — weren’t they a kind of digital marginalia? A chorus scribbled in the edges of a main post? Could those count as part of this lineage of poems-in-the-margins? You could argue yes: blog comments, pingbacks, even forum threads are marginalia. They’re written in the “edges” of a main text, they talk back, they annotate, they contradict, sometimes they even outlive the original post. They’re lateral voices, just like medieval glosses. In some ways, blog comment threads are the 21st-century equivalent of the scribe’s doodle or gloss — a palimpsest of readers layering over the original. But you could also argue no: online comments aren’t literally sharing the same physical margin; they’re architecturally separated (below the post, or on a different page). They’re “paratext” rather than “marginalia.” And unlike scribal marginalia, which usually had one reader at a time, internet commentary is multi-voiced, asynchronous, often cacophonous. And... unlike medieval ink, blog comments are fragile: platforms collapse, links rot, archives disappear. Maybe the internet’s margins are even more ghostly than parchment. So it comes down to definition:

If marginalia means “any writing in conversation with a main text,” then yes, digital comments and pingbacks fit neatly.
If it means “literally inscribed in the physical white space around a text,” then no, the analogy only works metaphorically. 

And honestly, that tension — between metaphorical lineage and material practice — is exactly the kind of ambiguity poetry thrives on. What would it mean to write a poem in the comment box itself? To let the margin become the poem, and the post the silent backdrop? And what about now, in the age of fleeting tweets and DMs? Maybe our marginalia aren't even in the margins anymore, maybe they're the whole page?

Marginalia Poetry

I opened the window to let the morning in.

Marginalia:
→ add: it hesitated, like it knew better
no — not “morning,”
   ~morning~ → uninvited memory
↑ this is where the draft pretends it’s gentle
(angry correction) stop romanticizing the ache
scribble: skrrt-skrrt (wingbeats / nerves)
^ move “opened” later; you only thought you did
question?? did you close it afterward
why does light always feel like an audit
o o o (three hollow suns, mocking)
→ insert: the birds weren’t singing — they were warning
you should say it plainly: you weren’t ready¹
[note to self:] next time, lie slower.

¹ yes, you kept the curtains drawn after.

~ Oizys.