Cosmopoetica

[photo by Greg Gladman]

As part of an effort at soul-salving, I am resuming my poetry memorizing routine. I’m just going to start with a new list, including some that I already know though I haven’t sat and recited them to myself for a long time. For me, memorizing is a way to burrow into and under the words. The poems I choose aren’t necessarily "great" in a canonical sense, they are the ones that grab my tongue and ears and won’t let go, sometimes obviously with a poem like Hopkins’ "Spring and Fall" and sometimes with more subtlety as in "Song" by Seamus Heaney. I don’t have a prodigious memory by any means, so I prefer shorter works where the language adds to my ability to recall, even if it’s not necessarily rhyming.

Up now is "Musée des Beaux Arts" — a poem I’ve always loved. Not sure what I’ll do next– suggestions?

Posted in: General 3 Comments »

Lately I’ve started memorizing poems– just short, favorite, mostly rhyming poems that I’ve always loved by Shelley, Hopkins, Cummings, etc.

It started as something to do during the interminable walks I’ve started going on in an attempt to work some exercise into my otherwise sedentary lifestyle, but it’s become an important part of my day.

As a poet, I’m stalled out. I still love poetry. I feel its seductive power every day. I’m confident in what I care for, and as a reader I’m happier than I’ve been in many years– maybe even since I was a child. But words and lines and images just aren’t coming to me, though I scribble something down almost every day, faithfully waiting for the muse to return and join me.

But the memorizing is taking me to a deeper relationship with the words, even with poems I’ve known and loved since childhood. Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” is a good example. I’ve read that poem for 25 years and only in the enforced repetition of memorizing did it finally open up fully to me… not the clear meaning, but the rhythms and the construction. I found poetic enlightenment through repetition. Similarly with Shelley’s “Ozymandias”– another poem whose obvious meaning has always resonated with me which I recognize as a complete master work only after memorizing it (blog disputes aside).

It’s not just the repetition, or even the attention. At some point while I’m memorizing a poem it will seem to come apart– like a word that’s been repeated so many times it suddenly seems new in one’s mouth– and then reconfigure itself anew. Suddenly some element I’d never really noticed or understood will make sense in a burst of mental light. Those moments are what I work for, the reader’s equivalent of a runner’s high, bursting through the wall.

It gives me hope. Hope because sometimes I forget there is beauty in this world and doubt the power of words. Hope because through this connection maybe I will find my own words again…

Posted in: Uncategorized 3 Comments »