Weird Studies/Poetry By Heart

10 Jul 2024 - 13 Jul 2024

I too have memorized Coleridge's Kubla Khan thanks to my father's habit of reciting it.

They touch on hunter-gatherer cultures and those who work from memory. (JF around 58). really want to drop Orality and Literacy

PF: oral cultures are conservative, they have to be (not to be confused with political conservatives). I think that's right, just from purely pragmatic standpoint, trad cultures cannot afford to innovate as much.

Renaissance changes memory places, from pragmatic tool to method for self-improvement magic

Closing was bad. Commoration to heart is great, but not the only form of reading or even necessarily the best.

Kubla Khan is one of the few poems I have committed to heart, and yes that means not rote memorization (I hate that and am bad at it) and more like a process of incorporating them into my own being, or trying to. This one I actually inherited from my father who used to recite it at random moments at home, so it has an extra dimension of aliveness for me.

I also enjoyed the discussion around memory and how it works in such an utterly different way in preliterate cultures. Don't think you mentioned Walter Ong this time but I know his book Orality and Literacy has come up on the podcast before. I count that among the more mindblowing books I've encountered, because of the implication that poetry is so basic, its really closer to the very stuff of thought than the dry symbols of rationalist cognition.

For me (and I understand if not everybody likes this way of thinking) they are wired into my machinery – they are machines themselves. Not in a bad way – the mechanical has such a bad repute around here. They are machines like organisms are machines, like life itself is a machine. Animate matter. Self-perpetuating patterns that are part of the larger pattern of Life Itself.

“[Jack] Spicer delighted in provocative and incongruous combinations. His statements are mercurial, and his lines refuse to be pinned down to a single register. His poems repeatedly disrupt even their own procedures by jamming the frequencies of meaning they set up. They make use of his life-long fascination with games and systems: bridge, baseball, chess, pinball, computers, magic, religion, politics, and linguistics.” (Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, from the introduction to My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer)