Posted by chris on 08/29/2010 - shortlink
I’m starting a new project: learning 100 poems by heart. Answers to some frequently asked questions:
- Why are you doing this? Because I need a different hobby. Because my creaky old brain needs the exercise. Because I hope to stave off my increasingly accelerating memory loss. Because, like the nuns of Carmel, I wish to keep dementia at bay. Because I believe something magical happens when one learns a poem by heart, that it allows us to get to the pith and sap and the dark streaked heart of it. It’s a bit like the way we might repeat a word or phrase so many times that, finally, it fails to make sense and then, out of that incoherence, it becomes ours.
- What poems are you memorizing? I’ll work that out as I go along. Poems that make the cut will be posted here and listed on the 100 By Heart project page.
- Why poetry? Because I’ve grown to both love and hate poetry. But the love outweighs the hate by a good margin… and I hope memorizing some poems I adore will increase the former and attenuate the latter.
- Why “By Heart?” Knowing something by heart and memorizing something are two different things. I could memorize a poem in a language I do not know, but I would be far from knowing that poem by heart.
- Why 100? It’s a nice round number. Base 10 arithmetic makes sense. Because it sounds more natural than “five score.”
- Will all the poems rhyme? No, though it’s been my experience that more formal poems desire the knowing of my heart than other kinds of poetry.
- How are you defining a “poem?” It’s a poem if I say it is, so prose poetry, bits of Shakespeare, and poetic prose count.
- Are you going to cheat with short poems? Since there are no rules, it’s hard to cheat. But to answer the question: absolutely. Haiku? American Sentences? Aphorisms? You bet. However, I reserve the right to refuse limericks.
- You and your project are fascinating… how do I follow along? I’ll be posting poems and notes here and they will automatically be listed on the 100 By Heart project page.
Posted by chris on 08/29/2010 - shortlink
“Spring and Fall”
Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins
Posted by chris on 08/29/2010 - shortlink
“Of Mere Being”
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
–Wallace Stevens (1954)
found in Opus Posthumous
Posted by chris on 08/28/2010 - shortlink
“Years ago, when I taught in the graduate program in writing at Columbia, the late Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was also on the faculty. Brodsky famously infuriated the students in his workshop on the first day of class, when he would announce that each student would be expected to memorize several poems (some lengthy) and recite them aloud. The students — even if they had known that Brodsky had learned English in dissenter’s exile in Russia by putting to heart the poems of Auden, among others — were outraged at first.
There was talk among students of refusing to comply with this requirement. Then they began to recite the poems learned by heart in class — and out of class. By the end of the term, students were “speaking” the poems of Auden and Bishop and Keats and Wyatt with dramatic authority and real enjoyment. Something had happened to change their minds. The poems they’d learned were now in their blood, beating with their hearts.”
–from “A Lost Eloquence” (Carol Muske-Dukes)
found in New York Times, 12/29/2002
Posted by chris on 08/28/2010 - shortlink
“That’s one of the things that poetry — thanks to its technology of memory, its intuition technology — is engineered so well to do. When we commit a poem to memory and say it aloud, our breath quite literally embodies the poet’s words. In this instance, the poet’s name is Anonymous, that fabulous bard who also wrote so many great prayers and hymns and ballads and drinking songs. We will never know the identity of this poet, but in a certain sense we know the poet intimately, because the poem, and all the emotion and experience it contains, has been concentrated into something we can carry with us, inside us. And in so doing, we come to know ourselves more intimately as well, for the lines help remind us of who we are: creatures who are full of longing, who look for signs in the sky, who ask the things of the world, the very winds and stars, for large and small favors; creatures who chant and lament and rock rhythmically and turn those rhythms into memorable songs and stories and lullabies and charms; creatures who want winter to end and spring rains to turn things green again and to return to the ones we hold dear.”
–from “Does Memory Have a Future” (David Barber)
found in Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture, Spring 2006
Posted by chris on 08/28/2010 - shortlink
Due to political interference by the King, English printers were largely using Dutch-originated type well into the 17th century. In 1670, John Fell purchased punches for type to be used by the Oxford University Press. Known collectively as the Fell Types, the letter forms represented a noticeable evolution with flattened serifs and significantly shorter extenders.
In 2000, a project was started to digitize the Fell Types using a combination of three different print sources. Four faces, including a variety of ligatures and swashes, plus a set of ornamental flowers are available as a free download in OpenType and TrueType formats.
These are beautiful faces with an immense amount of character that are well worth checking out even if you don’t have an immediate application for them…
Posted by chris on 08/28/2010 - shortlink
I love “Like Mom, Like Dad,” a ZeFrank photo project in which children re-create photos of themselves and/or their parents. A couple of selections:
Posted by chris on 08/28/2010 - shortlink
A powerful video (and I quite like the backing song too, Leah Siegel’s “Human”)…
