 Poetry: July 31, 2024 Issue [#12665] |
This week: Memory and Poetry & an Overdue Thank You Edited by: Fyn  
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A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.~~Robert Frost
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.~~Seamus Heaney
We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams. ~~Jeremy Irons
No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations. ~~Louis L'Amour
Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart. ~~Robert Fulghum
Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories. ~~Anthony Doerr
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I've written about my summer with Robert Frost before. I probably will again. An old man walking along a country backroad who took a little girl under his wing and taught her so much about words, poetry, and flying. Did he know back then that he was infusing me with stuff I'd remember sixty-plus years later? I was so young, but I remember it so clearly. Nestled into the gnarled roots of an ancient oak, me standing before him as he listened to me recite from memory a poem about choosing paths and his asking me what path would I choose . . . and why?
Memories, good and bad, are infused with far more than the mere memory of an event. The various visuals, the scents and smells surrounding us, how we felt in those moments, and what we heard in the background. These things imprint the memory. And these are the moments ripe for gleaning true poetry from! They are preloaded into our psyches and wait there, yearning to be told.
Sometimes, writing poetry about the 'not good' ---the miserable or horrific helps close it out, helps to release that emotion and helps us to go beyond. Writing about the joyful times helps spread it around, reiterates it for, possibly, the next generations to enjoy. Either way, mining those moments can make for the most powerful of poems because of the emotions intrinsically tangled up in them. It is one of the easiest ways to show where we were in that moment. It helps that the emotions spill forth yet again and we do so much more than say we were happy or scared or sad or horrified.
I remember that Frosty summer when I was pushed, shoved, and cajoled into writing more. Never content to let me be, he pushed for my best, my all. Good enough to him was never good enough. He never would let me settle for 'good enough.' He wanted more.
This afternoon, I talked to a far-flung cousin, one older than me, who remembered hearing about that summer from my grandmother and me. She reminded me of something I had forgotten. She said she remembered both me and my grandmother saying that he had said that when I was older, that I'd look back at that summer and write about it and how he wished he could be there to see what I wrote. Papa Frost, I like to think that somehow you have, and can, and know that I thank you.
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| |  | Inheritance (18+)
Needs to use the line "Spoils of the Dead" -From the Robert Frost poem of the same name
#1913436 by Fyn |
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Monty  writes: I always try to put myself in the shoes of the writer when I review so my reviews are different I think. I have been black and yellow then black, yellow and blue and then black and yellow again. I believe in me and know I am a good poet. You are a great writer in more than poetry.
Awww. Thank you, my friend. Coming from you, that means A LOT!
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