Your First Assignment

(Continuation of/elaboration on my comment on the previous post...)

I’m thinking about this now. I’m thinking about the poems that rise up and speak to us, poems we may have even met before but didn’t see at the time. The poems we fed off of for weeks or months or years. Poems we lived on as children or teenagers or adults, poems we lived on and left or poems we lived on and kept.

Can you remember these poems? Can you list them? Do you remember the order they fell in? Do they form some sort of narrative on their own? Can you… DO anything with them? (I don’t mean the last question in a futile sense, rather, an awed sense of possibility.)

Can I please pose this question to the world? Or, at least, the people I love who I’m interested in who read poetry? Or the people I’m fascinated by and wish I knew? Or a class of students somewhere as an assignment?

I want to see the list alone, first, alone for a good long time -- just titles and names, and then I want a list with commentary, prose, whatever, photographs, anything – some personalized links.

I want lists. Distilled lists – not the 100 poems that fed you. I mean THE poems that were your staple foods. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty, if you’re voracious. The ones you memorized so you wouldn’t have to spend a day apart. The ones you rewrote in five journals. The ones that were in your mind even in sleep.

I’m working on my list. Some of the poems, of course, were obvious to me right away. Others, I fed off of once, and they’re buried now, but they’re coming back, I’m remembering them.

(((Note: I laughed like a crazy person when I finished typing this post -- and then realized my windows were open and my floor mates probably suspect my sanity now)))