I promised a post on more political history, but we had a discussion last night about poetry that I felt merited a blog post and wider feedback.
I mentioned to Raven last night that there is a poem in Russia that most everyone knows and memorizes in school. Ask someone raised in the Russian school system to recite "I Loved You Once" by Alexander Pushkin and I bet most of them will be able to. In fact, after 4 years of Russian myself, I can still recite the poem from memory 3 years after my last Russian class ended. Then we got to talking about English language poetry - were there any poems we thought most English speakers (or even most US or British or Canadian raised folks) could recite from memory. We came up with mostly nursery rhymes, proverbs, prayers, or patriotic anthems. But no poems on par with Pushkin's.
I adore poetry - I think that sentiment came across pretty well in my earlier post about spoken word poetry. But I'm awful at memorization. I have never had a great capacity to commit words on a page to memory, though when something is spoken I can often remember it for years. In fact, the only reason I can still recite Alexander Pushkin's poem is that for some time Russian class began with a recitation of the poem. I have heard it more often than I have read it.
I don't know that memorization increases the power or the impact of a poem, but I do wish I knew more poetry by heart and could recite it at will. I wish I didn't have to reach for a smart phone when I want to know all the other stanzas to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" or when I want to know when exactly Annabel Lee's highborn kinsman come to steal her away from the speaker.
I'm going to set myself a goal today - memorize 10 poems. 5 will be of my own choosing, 5 will of Raven's choosing (please no epic poems!) I'd like to memorize poems by different authors. I urge anyone reading this to think of at least one poem they love and think about committing it to memory. Maybe it won't change how you feel about the poem, or deepen your enjoyment of it. It probably won't change your life and I don't you'll feel the poem's presence cropping up more in your everyday life. But just think how cool (and smart) you'll feel at your ability to recite poetry on command.
5 Poems Owl Will (Try To) Commit To Memory
1. Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe (I've been working on this one for years already)
2. Because I Could Not Stop For Death by Emily Dickinson
3. Saturday's Child by Countee Cullen (if you don't know Cullen's work - you should, he is one of my favorite Harlem Renaissance poets)
4. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (I should really know this one by now, but it's so much longer than I remember it being...)
5. somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
So there you have it - 5 poems I will memorize by 5 US poets I greatly admire. I'd like to do 5 more poets of foreign extraction. Raven - I leave those poets and poems to your discretion.
Since this post focused exclusively on domestic poets (and Alexander Pushkin) I wanted to add a list of some of my favorite non-US born poets.
Non-US Poets:
1. Pablo Neruda
2. Seamus Heaney
3. Octavio Paz
4. Eavan Boland
5. Anna Akhmatova
6. William Wordsworth
7. William Shakespeare
8. W.B. Yeats
9. William Blake
10. Oscar Wilde
11. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
12. Andrew Marvell
13. Samuel Coleridge
14. Dylan Thomas
15. Alexander Pushkin (obviously)
There are so many more poets, both from my home country and beyond that speak to me and who I love dearly, but time grows short and I want to leave Raven something to talk about! This is her area of love even more than mine.
Hope you have fun giving me a reading/memorizing assignment, my dear!
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