The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, 'Give and Take,' was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.
I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.
I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.
Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.
When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.