– 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.
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).
- 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)
footnote¹¹ 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?
→ 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.
