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24 April 2005: the story is that Ezra Pound's mistress wouldn't let a stranger visit him unless the stranger could recite one of Ezra's poems from memory. I would probably recite, "In a Station of the Metro" as "the apparition of these faces:/ petals on a wet, black bough"--which I'm pretty sure is wrong. Ha, I just looked it up and see I forgot "in the crowd," something I never forget. I claim I was trying so hard to get the second line right, I didn't give the first proper effort. I'm surprised that I got the second line right. My point is that I have no memory for poetry. This, I claim, is intentional. In school, I did very well on lots of tests because I had a very good rote memory then, but I've since more or less intentionally tried to convert accuracy for gist, or the scholar's memory to the artist's--and succeeded too well, I sometimes think.
All of which is a build to an attempt now to quote from memory a poem of Mike Basinski's. I read it a couple of hours ago when scanning a page from a copy of The Experriodicist that was devoted to me in 1993(!). It had some poems I wanted to use in my presentation on Cummings's influence. Okay, here's the poem: "wom/ oOn/ wat/ her." Nuts, I just checked; I'm wrong. The correct version is:
Note: this entry updated on 29 April 2005. I posted it on that date at New-Poetry with a challenge for those who think poetry must be metrical to tell me what it was if not poetry. I didn't realize it is rigidly metrical!
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