I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

I remember having to memorize Carl Sandberg's poem "Fog" (was it?). I remember it (misremember it I'm sure) as "The fog comes in on / little cat feet / sits quietly / looking over / harbor and city / and then moves on." Our teacher had very high praise for "little cat feet." I was impressed by the praise: it made me think there was another way of thinking about poems. The line didn't quite get me though, although I didn't admit that to myself then. It still doesn't. But I think our teacher also liked the way "little cat feet" set up "sits," which is good. I liked "The people, yes" much better: that seemed to make Sandberg a real poet. Am I spelling his name right? I remember he wrote that biography of Lincoln. I'm sure I never read him after junior high. But as to "Fog," I remember trying to memorize it, standing in the living room by the stereo, and failing over and over, till my father had me memorize it by one-line increments. Except I think it was actually a different Sandberg poem I was memorizing, after we'd read "Fog" in class. But I don't remember what that different poem was. I think it also had a ship or a harbor of the sea in it. But it was longer than "Fog." I seem to remember also that I first heard about Upton Sinclair in connection with Sandberg: they were both radical muck-rakers interested in Chicago.

posted by william 10:23 PM
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