Saturday 19 January 2008

What, memory?

Ran into Ken Mitchell last night at Cougar basketball (we're both long-time season ticket holders). He's got another new idea: to open a spoken word, Saturday night event at a local nightspot. Said he wants me to be part of it.

The last time Ken told me something like that, I spent hours memorizing new poems as I wrote them. Took forever. A couple of the poems will show up in My Human Comedy (arriving from the printers within three months). But I realized--this was at a writer's retreat at St. Peter's one February, two or three years ago--that committing work to memory is easier if the work rhymes.

It was cold as hell. I was out jogging in the bright sunshine, turning west along the grid road south of the Abbey. Every step pounded the new poem into memory: something about an east view, an Oldsmobile, can't remember the rest.

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