There’s been some talk about memorizing things in a comment thread here and it made me think of how little I’ve actually memorized. What are some things some things you’ve committed to memory?
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John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
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Had to: Tomorrow Speech in Macbeth, Opening Prologue of the Canterbury Tales and opening incantation to the muse in Paradise Lost.
Didn’t have to: Sonnet 116, “Mock Orange” – Louise Gluck, beginning of Lucky’s diatribe in ‘Waiting for Godot’
Van Morrison’s ‘And it Stoned Me’ and Magnetic Fields’ – ‘I Don’t Want to Get Over You’:
I don’t want to get over you. I guess I could take
a sleeping pill and sleep at will and not have to
go through what I go through. I guess I should take
Prozac, right, and just smile all night at somebody new,
Somebody not too bright but sweet and kind who would
try to get you off my mind. I could leave this agony behind
which is just what I’d do if I wanted to, but I don’t
want to get over you cause I don’t want to get over love.
I could listen to my therapist, pretend you don’t exist
and not have to dream of what I dream of; I could listen
to all my friends and go out again and pretend it’s enough,
or I could make a career of being blue–I could dress
in black and read Camus, smoke clove cigarettes and drink
vermouth like I was 17 that would be a scream but I
don’t want to get over you.
I’m pretty much limited to “In Flanders Fields” and “There Once Was a Girl from Nantucket.”
Plus the lyrics to far too many rock songs, of course.
There was a thread on Bark the other day about memorization and I wrote a comment about memorized song lyrics. I have hundreds of them locked away. It’s whack; I’ll hear a song I’ve not heard since highschool and can still sing along.
“Fire and Ice” and “i carry your heart with me”
In middle school when I hated poetry, I got away with “cheating” a poem memorization assignment by memorizing Sandburg’s “Fog.” Had I known better then, I should have memorized “In a Station of the Metro,” but that’s what I get for hating poetry then.
I do far too little memorizing of things.