Long ago when I first started as an undergraduate I was at a bar speaking to an old man and told him I was an English major and he asked me to recite a poem. I couldn’t. Maybe I could manage Poe’s The Bells for I had that by heart once. Memorizing poetry was a favorite punishment of the Christian Brothers for the upper (smarter) class. The lower class (just average smart but daddy could pay the fabulous tuition) got the paddle. It put me off the idea of memorizing poetry, even poetry I loved.
I still have nothing properly by heart although I have some fragments I’m pretty close to. I can’t remember the title right now but believe I could recite Yeats’ one about “the silver apples of the moon and golden apples of the sun,” or most of the section of Wallace Steven’s ” Sunday Morning” that ends ”and whence they came and whither they shall go/the dew upon their feet shall manifest.”
I know I should memorize more poetry, perhaps as an exercise as old age nibbles at my brain. I have at 50% of a firm bi-polar Gemini’s determination to do so. Perhaps instead of poetry I will memorize Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Then if I’m not remembered as a poet I might be remembered as the man who knew Godot.
The Man Who Knew Godot
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
.
Well Bottom Blues 
Leave a comment