These are called thesis binders. This one is all beaten up. But you can't really even buy them. You used to be able to buy them in stationary stores.
- Rae Armantrout
So, this is really old school. But the way I use it is, it helps me order—not only keep the poems for the manuscript, but I order the manuscript this way. I mean, I kind of decide what reads well by trying the poems out in different places within this manuscript so that I don't do that thing you hear about writers doing about spreading the pages all over the floor, or all over the walls, or something. Because I've already been deciding as I went along by where I place them in this thesis binder.
At Montana when I was in graduate school, if you didn't have a spring binder to keep your poems in, you just weren't shit. I mean, it was your spring binder, man. "I don't have one." "Oh..."
- Robert Wrigley
I have this which is sort of the in-process folder—a little "thesisbinder," they're called at Harvard. In the back go all the poems that have been published with the name of the magazine on it and in front are the ones that are still in progress.
Thesis Binder