It’s embarrassing how little I remember sometimes.
I have an English degree, and the head full of dusty literature that comes with it, but all too often I fail to recollect the lines I need to recall, when I need to recall them.
Others stick forever with me, even if the context of their origin is sometimes fuzzy.
“This is history, how it sounds. What do I love? Remind me.”
That’s a line from the poet Bin Ramke, best I remember it, from his work “When Culture Was Popular,” which is part of his anthology Massacre of the Innocents.
I met him, somewhere along 1997 or so, shortly after that was published. He spoke to an advanced creative writing class I was part of, only a dozen or so students, and we sat in a coffee shop and asked endless questions about his work, his process, hoping, each of us, to capture some bit of magic from this master in our midst, each still sheltering at least some fragment of a dream that we could be the sort of practitioner he had become — stable, employed, respected. Any two of those, maybe. Hell, one, so long as it was part of an existence as a writer.
I don’t have to tell you I’m one of the ones who didn’t make it. That sort of statement is redundant to tell someone who has made it here to this neglected little spot online.
These days the very best lines of poetry I make — any writing at all, really — stay in my head for the little bit of time they last before I dismiss them, usually before even approaching a writing implement.
Then days like this come along — 50 Dead in Orlando — and all I want is to be back in that coffee shop, dreaming those dreams, because at least then I still believed that words mattered, that something someone wrote might make a difference, than any little piece of peace in this world was achievable …
But that part of the dream is as lost as the rest of it, and I just sit here wondering what any of it matters, anywhere, anymore.
I am tired of the sound of history, and I do not remember what I love anymore … but I am trying, I am here today, trying, to remind myself.
lastgreypoet 