Committing to Memory
An abiding fear of mine is that, one day, an inquisitive and well-meaning person will ask me to recite one of my poems.On that occasion, I'll have to very discreetly jump from the nearest balcony and...
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Yol, you guess correctly in my case. I don't have anything by heart now, but if I get more than the one (far down the road) reading gig I'm now scheduled for, I'll work to know things well enough not...
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Exactly the same here. I can never remember my poems by heart because they have been through so many revisions (many, many revisions before I even post them on this board). But there are a few I've...
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For me, no problem, unless a bit drunk. I can recite almost any of my own stuff and a great deal of Burns, Hardy and some lesser mortals (but we're all lesser than that pair!) Francois Villon could...
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One of my favorite scenes in all theater is when Cyrano fights a duel while composing a ballade on the spot. Dave, how are you with the cutlass?Margaret
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I never remember my own stuff. That's probably because, truth told, it's not particularly memorable.I have sizable chunks of Shakespeare by heart and even some Euripides but strictly speaking it's not...
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I have swathes of Pound, Eliot, Larkin, and Auden down by memory now, mostly just through rereading. Where my own work is concerned, I can do a lot of my own shorter pieces by memory, as well as...
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At my age, the things I remember are the lyrics to songs I sang in grammar-school operettas, bits of poems I read as a child. I'm told this is typical of old age. Someone explained to me that what one...
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I recite my poems while I'm trying to get to sleep at night. It puts me right out. But along the way, I wind up memorizing everything. At least that's the way I used to do it. Now I'm exhausting...
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Hi,what a fascinating thread. Clearly it seems people remember the poetry that they perform. Sometimes they perform it in public. More interesting, however, is the indication that running through your...
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Solace - you hit the nail on the head, Alan. Lately I've been thinking poems are for comfort - both the writing and the reading. When I was just a wee sprite, I used to sing myself to sleep. It was a...
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I have a few lines and a few real short poems that i know by heart, but i'm kind of like you yol as far as writing something and moving on, though coming back to read it now and again; though through...
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Interesting thread.When I'm writing something (which I haven't done seriously for a while) I hear it over and over in my head, which is how I revise.So I can recall pretty much everything I've...
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Might also add that I find non-metrical poetry far harder to memorise, but I think that's normal.
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Like David, when I'm writing something, bits of it are always repeating themselves in my head. But after I'm done, it fades away, so that there's very little that I could recite without some prompting...
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I've been enjoying this thread, while waiting for enough internet time to add to it. The first time I realized I knew a poem by heart -- it was Jabberwocky -- it changed my understand of what a poem...
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I know a number of my own things by heart, but if someone asked me to recite one at a moment's notice, I would probably be too stunned to reply, except for a 5-line bit of free verse that might come...
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I could be completely wrong here, but I have a feeling -that people who think of poetry as primarily oral/aural will tend to memorise swathes of the stuff, while -people who think of it as primarily...
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