Venting a little on poetry.

Before Mom's birthday dinner earlier, I was panicking over the fact that I confused the poems of Khalil Gibran with Rabindranath Tagore, couldn't tell who Mary Oliver was from Edna St. Vincent Millay, and mistook Dorothy Parker for Dorothy Sayers. It happened while I was looking for poems as accompaniment of our presents (Gibran's "On Children" from "The Prophecy", "If I Could Tell You" by W. H. Auden, and an untitled poem by Kabir translated by Robert Bly). This recent freak out is due to three factors:

- My poems files are just as disorganized as my photo/image files, which reflects how my thoughts on poetry and visual art get muddled despite my brain's preference for linear thinking.

- Nothing pisses me off than forgetting a poem, because poetry memorization is a long and hard process for me. I hated my unhelpful brain cells so much that I couldn't think straight. (Damn hormones.) Give me pages of Shakespeare to memorize for a play, and I'll remember it more than I could recall something as short as Invictus and who wrote it (William Ernest Henley, because I Googled).

- My school books on English literature, Filipino books in English, and lit compilations have long been given away. (I told my Mom I'd rather give away my manga collection than part with my favorite books, books that were given to me, and books I personally bought. She couldn't give away my manga because they weren't useful anyway, so she relented.) Hence, I had to rely on the internet and my memory to retrieve bits of poetry I have cluttered in my head. Digital references aren't the same as physical copies (I still rely on my high school notes, for example), so I easily get frustrated when being made to look these up in the internet, mostly because of the possibility that I wouldn't find it there. I don't know if I'm just being some kind of an old-fashioned romantic, or simply dependent upon sensory memory.

I cling to my non-neurotic auditory memory.