I'm so frustrated with my brain at the moment! I was sitting in a seminar/lecture tonight and something came to my mind that I wanted to remember, and now I have no idea what it was! Do you know that feeling when you are trying so hard to remember something and that part of your memory is like when a DVD has a scratch in it and it just gets stuck? That's how I feel.
The really frustrating part is that I remember thinking that it would be a great starting point for a letter and now, since I can't think of it, I have no inspiration for my writing tonight. All I can recall is that it was a quotation from somewhere... maybe a song or a poem... and I really liked it. It's something I've heard before but I don't know where. The more I try to put myself back in that place in order to conjure up some kind of clarity, the fuzzier my memory gets.
This is what happens when you get very little sleep, teach all day and have class all night.
Anyway...
Have you seen those (let it be noted that I kept trying to write those as "thoes" just now and had no idea what was wrong with it) poems made from book pages or newspaper articles where the whole page is blacked out with Sharpie except for a selection of words that create the poem?
This is what I'm talking about:
I love, love, love these and I want to do them myself! I have a feeling that they're much harder than they seem, though. But I think they're brilliant and someday I'm going to buy an old book from a thrift store and turn every page into a poem like this.
I've always wondered, when creating these blackout poems, whether you start with an idea of what you want the poem to be about and hunt for the words on the page that say what you want to say, or if you let what's on the page dictate what appears in the poem...
I shall leave you with this little anecdote that made my day today and has nothing to do with memories or poetry: I handed out an assignment in Latin class today where the kids had to be archaeologists and "dig" for information about the German archaeologist who claims to have unearthed ruins of the city of Troy in Turkey. I thought this would be a very boring assignment because I gave them the text and a set of questions and they just had to read through the text to find the answers. But I've never seen them so focused and quiet, and at the end of class, one of the most troublesome kids came up to me and said, "Thank you, that was really fun." Oh, the little joys and victories of this job. I find new reasons to fall in love with it every day.
Love, M
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