February 16th, 2011 / 6:44 pm
 Snippets
—

do you have any poems memorized?

(how many poems do you have memorized?)

56 Comments

  1. February 16th, 2011 / 11:04 pm Jimmy Chen—

      just one:

      in my hut this morning
      there is nothing
      there is everything

      –anonymous monk

  2. February 16th, 2011 / 11:07 pm SP—

      Edna St. V. Millay’s “First Fig,” WCW’s “This is just to say,” and EE Cummings’ “i like my body when it is with your body.” (The last one, if memorized, has the power to get anyone laid.)

  3. February 16th, 2011 / 11:08 pm Dreezer—

      There’s Google. Why would I want to memorize a poem?

  4. February 16th, 2011 / 11:39 pm Sean—

      Question is a little loaded. Are you advocating a form of American education once prevalent?

      I feel every student should leave a poetry class with one memorized poem. Why not?

      Two I have memorized: Fire and Ice by Frost and Larkin This be the Verse. I also have a bit of various Shakespeare.

      I have recited all of this while drunk at deer camps, over open fires. It is VERY effective late at night, around a fire. Most everyone really enjoys it, just one reason to memorize. You can put on little performance pieces at times. Everyone else tells lame ghost stories. Or worse, jokes.

  5. February 16th, 2011 / 11:39 pm Sean—

      Question is a little loaded. Are you advocating a form of American education once prevalent?

      I feel every student should leave a poetry class with one memorized poem. Why not?

      Two I have memorized: Fire and Ice by Frost and Larkin This be the Verse. I also have a bit of various Shakespeare.

      I have recited all of this while drunk at deer camps, over open fires. It is VERY effective late at night, around a fire. Most everyone really enjoys it, just one reason to memorize. You can put on little performance pieces at times. Everyone else tells lame ghost stories. Or worse, jokes.

  6. February 16th, 2011 / 11:51 pm Lincoln Michel—

      My mother was a braid of black smoke.
      She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.
      The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.
      We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke.
      The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.

      (Double checked it and only had one error.)

      I think I have a few shell silverstein poems memorized from childhood and probably some haiku.

  7. February 17th, 2011 / 12:00 am Trey—

      I don’t have any memorized myself, but I kind of like when poets have memorized their own poems for readings. it’s not really enough on its own, but it provides for a kind of intensity. I think maybe heather christle had her poems memorized when she did the web reading here. maybe she didn’t, but in my memory she was making super eye contact with the camera and not looking down, or at least not often, and it is still one of the most riveting readings I’ve heard/seen.

  8. February 17th, 2011 / 12:04 am Amy McDaniel—

      for about a year when i was maybe sixteen i recited “A Clear Midnight” by Whitman every night before I went to sleep:

      THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
      Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
      Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
      lovest best.
      Night, sleep, death and the stars.

      I still think it is really lovely but I don’t have it memorized anymore. It was a good ritual. Maybe it is time for a new one. Or maybe I’ll wait and have kids and make them memorize and recite poems to me.

  9. February 17th, 2011 / 12:07 am Trey—

      make them memorize and recite the entirety of Song of Myself

  10. February 17th, 2011 / 12:07 am Trey—

      make them memorize and recite the entirety of Song of Myself

  11. February 17th, 2011 / 12:09 am Amy McDaniel—

      yes! i was thinking Rime of the Ancient Mariner but that’s so easy what with all the riming.

  12. February 17th, 2011 / 12:09 am Amy McDaniel—

      yes! i was thinking Rime of the Ancient Mariner but that’s so easy what with all the riming.

  13. February 17th, 2011 / 12:15 am adam m.—

      channels by shel silverstein

      channel one is no fun
      channel two is just news
      channel three is hard to see
      channel four is just a bore
      channel five is all jive
      channel six needs to be fix
      channel seven and channel eight?
      just old movies not so great
      channel 9’s a waste of time
      channel 10 is off, my child
      woundlt you like to talk a while?

      channels by shel silverstein

  14. February 17th, 2011 / 12:15 am adam m.—

      channels by shel silverstein

      channel one is no fun
      channel two is just news
      channel three is hard to see
      channel four is just a bore
      channel five is all jive
      channel six needs to be fix
      channel seven and channel eight?
      just old movies not so great
      channel 9’s a waste of time
      channel 10 is off, my child
      woundlt you like to talk a while?

      channels by shel silverstein

  15. February 17th, 2011 / 12:15 am adam m.—

      channels by shel silverstein

      channel one is no fun
      channel two is just news
      channel three is hard to see
      channel four is just a bore
      channel five is all jive
      channel six needs to be fix
      channel seven and channel eight?
      just old movies not so great
      channel 9’s a waste of time
      channel 10 is off, my child
      woundlt you like to talk a while?

      channels by shel silverstein

  16. February 17th, 2011 / 1:25 am drew kalbach—

      stopping by the woods on a snowy evening by robert frost.

  17. February 17th, 2011 / 1:39 am Adam Robinson—
  18. February 17th, 2011 / 2:02 am Jeff—

      “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by Wally Stevens. It’s never anthologized but in my opinion it’s one of Stevens’ best poems.

  19. February 17th, 2011 / 2:02 am Amber—

      I used to but I’ve forgotten most them except for Dover Beach. And Emperor of Ice Cream. I can remember lots of bits of Tennyson but not a whole poem.

      I used to love memorizing poetry. I think I should do it again–seems like recitation is a lost art.

  20. February 17th, 2011 / 2:29 am chadly—

      I came to poetry after a life spent memorizing Bible verses, so shit yeah, I’ve got poems memorized. I don’t know how many. I’ve forgotten more than I remember and have random lines from many others. The one I’m most likely to recite while drunk is Yeat’s “Adam’s Curse.” A.E. Housman’s “Terence This is Stupid Stuff” is another drunken favorite.

  21. February 17th, 2011 / 3:55 am deadgod—

      Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
      We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
      A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

      Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
      We make a dwelling in the evening air,
      In which being there together is enough.

      I remember that poem of “the intensest rendezvous” from a Norton anthology that was current 30 years ago.

      I agree: one of his best. Anthologies change; why do you suppose it’s been pushed aside in newer “English/American Poetry”s? – too many other Stevensian gems? too direct and too obscure at once? too unfashionable to mingle “God and the imagination” – even tentatively, even as figures of speech?

  22. February 17th, 2011 / 3:58 am deadgod—

      Some folks came to sit and think;
      Others came to shit and stink.
      I just came to scratch my balls
      And read the writing on the walls.

  23. February 17th, 2011 / 4:30 am Anonymous—

      I recited “Fire and Ice” (from memory) to my literature seminar less than an hour ago then we all died.

  24. February 17th, 2011 / 6:38 am Ted—

      ‘the ongoing story’ by john ashbery

  25. February 17th, 2011 / 8:03 am Daniel Bailey—

      when i was an undergrad mark neely had us memorize a poem and recite and i memorized a matthew savoca poem from alice blue. i don’t remember it now.

      i can probably recite red wheelbarrow now that i’ve heard it so many times in my life.

      there’s really no point to memorize a poem unless you do it for performance purposes.

  26. February 17th, 2011 / 8:23 am Cmcallisterwilliams—

      The Redwheelbarrow by WCW. Is that a cop-out? This may be a cop-out.

  27. February 17th, 2011 / 1:12 pm eldis—

      I took a Chaucer course and one of the finals was we had to memorize 50 lines of the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. I did the first 20-ish lines and a chunk of the end of the Miller’s Prologue. Can’t exactly recite it around a campfire, but it was definitely a good inlet to Canterbury and helped make it more accessible than simply reading silently.

  28. February 17th, 2011 / 1:31 pm Tummler—

      That’s my answer as well. It may be a cop-out, but I just really love WCW and I love writing the poem on chalkboards and random places as a sort of graffiti.

  29. February 17th, 2011 / 2:18 pm NLY—

      I’ve been memorizing poems for years, now, and for awhile I had this thing where I was memorizing a poem a day, but eventually I stopped being that steady about it, though I still memorize poems.

  30. February 17th, 2011 / 2:18 pm NLY—

      I’ve been memorizing poems for years, now, and for awhile I had this thing where I was memorizing a poem a day, but eventually I stopped being that steady about it, though I still memorize poems.

  31. February 17th, 2011 / 2:18 pm NLY—

      I’ve been memorizing poems for years, now, and for awhile I had this thing where I was memorizing a poem a day, but eventually I stopped being that steady about it, though I still memorize poems.

  32. February 17th, 2011 / 2:54 pm NLY—

      down in lovely muck!

  33. February 17th, 2011 / 2:54 pm NLY—

      down in lovely muck!

  34. February 17th, 2011 / 3:14 pm Nicole Sarrocco—

      Lots of sonnets and some villanelles (since they’re only about half the work). But I like to say Frost’s “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” and Pound’s “A Virginal.” And I also have had the poem from Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series stuck in my head since fifth grade.

  35. February 17th, 2011 / 3:14 pm Nicole Sarrocco—

      Lots of sonnets and some villanelles (since they’re only about half the work). But I like to say Frost’s “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” and Pound’s “A Virginal.” And I also have had the poem from Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series stuck in my head since fifth grade.

  36. February 17th, 2011 / 3:26 pm NLY—

      I don’t know, I’ve never done it for anyone’s benefit but my own, really. I mean, occasionally a situation will arise where I’ll wind up reciting one, but mostly nah. For me it’s a way of being more intimate with a piece, an act of mutual possession. In the intro her book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, Helen Vender talks about the role memorization played in her writing the book–how she felt she didn’t really know a piece until it was memorized, how it increasingly felt as though the parts she had failed to fully understand were also the parts she’d failed to fully recall. In any case, when she said ‘know’, I always took it in the biblical sense.

  37. February 17th, 2011 / 6:00 pm Margaret—

      The short series “As For Poets” by Gary Snyder, half of Diane di Prima’s “More or Less Love Poems”, and a version of Hugo Ball’s “The Executioner”. I’ve had a couple of the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven’s poems memorized, but am not sure I could pull them up flawlessly right now.

      I do performance of poetry through the group The TypewriterGirls and we work actively at memorizing poems for our performances.

  38. February 17th, 2011 / 6:03 pm sydney—

      i memorize poetry as a mental exercise and also because i love having those brilliant words stored up. george steiner says that what you have not memorized you have not loved enough. also when you go through the process of committing a poem to memory, you notice things about it that had escaped you in every other reading, even if it is a favorite and you’ve read it over and over. lately i’ve been doing prufrock, which’ll be my longest once i have it all, and it’s like i can see its joints all of a sudden.

  39. February 17th, 2011 / 6:18 pm letters journal—

      I used to have some parts of Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly memorized. It’s my favorite poem.

      I memorized some of the opening lines of scene 2, act 2 of Shakespeare’s ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’: Why then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.

  40. February 17th, 2011 / 6:50 pm Nate Martin—

      ‘I Know a Man’ by Robert Creeley, the poem that guides my life.

  41. February 17th, 2011 / 6:57 pm effervescence (david fishkind)—

      emily dickinson:
      success is counted sweetest
      by those who ne’er succeed
      (and then more stuff)

      from ‘song of myself’ by walt:
      Speaker up there… Here, you… what have you to confide in me?
      look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening.
      Talk honestly, for no one else hears you and I stay only a minute longer…

      Do I contradict myself?
      Very well then, I contradict myself.
      I am large… I contain multitudes.

      I concentrate toward them that are nigh… I wait on the door slab.
      Who has finished his day’s work and will soonest be through with his supper?
      Who wishes to walk with me?
      Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

      i know, i know, thanks guys

  42. February 17th, 2011 / 6:57 pm effervescence—

      my new poetry name is effervescence btw

  43. February 17th, 2011 / 6:59 pm effervescence—

      FUCK! IT’S “Who has done his day’s work and will soonest be through with his supper?”

      FUCK! I’M SORRY GUYS. I JUST REMEMBERED

  44. February 17th, 2011 / 7:24 pm William Owen—

      a fair bit of W.C. Williams – Red Wheelbarrow, and a section from Paterson about the falls that has the bit on curdy spume. Most of Prufrock

  45. February 17th, 2011 / 7:24 pm William Owen—

      a fair bit of W.C. Williams – Red Wheelbarrow, and a section from Paterson about the falls that has the bit on curdy spume. Most of Prufrock

  46. February 17th, 2011 / 10:46 pm jackie wang—

      in middle school i memorized poe, annabelle lee.

      in high school i memorized baudelaire, be drunk. i recited it to my class with a rootbeer bottle.

      beckett, most of waiting for godot (not a poem, but still)
      i would recite beckett in my head while i worked as a cashier at a grocery store.

      edna st. vincent millay….

      can’t remember what else….

  47. February 18th, 2011 / 2:19 am shaun gannon—

      can fish be wives and wives and wives and have as many as that
      can fish be wives and have as many as that
      ten o’clock or earlier

  48. February 18th, 2011 / 6:33 am m.g. martin—
  49. February 18th, 2011 / 6:41 am jesusangelgarcia—

      True dat. I’ve seen it, heard it, been inspired by it. I’ve currently got two mashups from my bad novel memorized: ten and five or so minutes, respectively. I also still remember most of a Dylan Thomas poem — The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower — memorized way back when.

  50. February 18th, 2011 / 6:42 am jesusangelgarcia—

      most of godot? impressive. have you ever performed it on stage?

  51. February 18th, 2011 / 6:42 am jesusangelgarcia—

      most of godot? impressive. have you ever performed it on stage?

  52. February 18th, 2011 / 8:13 am Anonymous—

      that’s what’s up

  53. February 18th, 2011 / 8:13 am Anonymous—

      that’s what’s up

  54. February 18th, 2011 / 8:21 am Anonymous—

      it’s easy to grin
      when your ship comes in
      and you’ve got the stock market beat
      but the man worthwhile
      is the man who can smile
      when his shorts are too tight in the seat

  55. February 19th, 2011 / 12:34 am michael—

      I’ve got Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess,’ Shakespeare’s sonnet #130, Ariana Reines’ ‘I LOVE MY EMERGENCY,’ and Ben Lerner’s ‘Resembling a mobile but having no mobile parts…’. I think that’s it.

  56. February 19th, 2011 / 5:50 am Forrest Muelrath—

      Welcome, stranger, to this place,
      where joy doth sit on every bough,
      paleness flies from every face,
      and we reap not what we do not sow.

      Where innocence doth like a rose,
      bloom on every maiden’s cheek,
      honor twines around her brow,
      and the jewel health adorns her neck.

      Or something like that. I learned it while living alone in rural Vermont, imagining a stranger might stop by.