so here's to drinks in the dark
Spring Break is finally giving me a chance to catch my breath a bit. Monday I defend my thesis and find out if I graduate. Wow. It's uh, it's only five days away. Excuse me while I go have five days' worth of freaking out.
A lot of people asked about reading my thesis when it was done. I haven't had a chance to format the file properly for distribution, but I hope to have that done within the next couple of days. If anyone who reads this wants it, let me know (even if you have already, because I've probably forgotten).
It's National Poetry Month. Last month was basically a solid month of poetry for me, so I'm not sure I want to do what I've done in previous years and write a poem a day for the whole month. Instead I'm focusing on reading and memorizing. I actually have a fair number of poems memorized, compared to the, you know, zero that most people can recite, but I want to have a whole catalog of them, especially the poems I love most. Currently, I have memorized and can recite "To Earthward" (Frost), "Fire and Ice" (Frost), Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare), Sonnet 130 (Shakespeare), "She Walks in Beauty" (Byron), "First Fig" by Millay, "You Fit Into Me" by Atwood, Puck's closing soliloquy of Midsummer Night's Dream, and the first three stanzas of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (Eliot).
I had a list at one point, somewhere, of other poems I wanted to memorize. Stars only know what's happened to that; odds are it'll turn up right about the time I get it reconstructed anyway. To that end, I figure the easiest way to find it is to rewrite it, so here goes:
the first 18 lines of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in Middle English (I knew it once)
I uh... I kinda want to memorize, you know, all of Shakespeare's sonnets. For the sake of my sanity, though, I'll narrow it specifically to 1, 18, 29, 55, 60, 65, 109, 144.
"Whoso List to Hunt" by Wyatt
"Ozymandias" by Shelley
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by Keats
"When You Are Old" by Yeats
"The Second Coming" by Yeats
"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by Eliot
"East Coker IV" by Eliot (well, all of the Four Quartets if I'm feeling particularly, you know, insane)
certain passages from The Waste Land by Eliot
"Acquainted with the Night" by Frost
"Desert Places" by Frost
"The Waking" by Roethke
"I Knew a Woman" by Roethke
"Helen" by HD
"Spring" by Millay
"Dirge Without Music" by Millay
"Beacons at Bealtaine" by Heaney
"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Thomas
Sonnet 17 ("I do not love you as if/No te amo como si fueras") by Neruda, in both languages
"The God Abandons Antony" by Cavafy
I know there are others; I'll keep adding to this list as they come to mind. Still, I think that's enough to be going on with, for now.
And yes, this is what I do with my spare time. Now you all know how sad my life is :P
A lot of people asked about reading my thesis when it was done. I haven't had a chance to format the file properly for distribution, but I hope to have that done within the next couple of days. If anyone who reads this wants it, let me know (even if you have already, because I've probably forgotten).
It's National Poetry Month. Last month was basically a solid month of poetry for me, so I'm not sure I want to do what I've done in previous years and write a poem a day for the whole month. Instead I'm focusing on reading and memorizing. I actually have a fair number of poems memorized, compared to the, you know, zero that most people can recite, but I want to have a whole catalog of them, especially the poems I love most. Currently, I have memorized and can recite "To Earthward" (Frost), "Fire and Ice" (Frost), Sonnet 116 (Shakespeare), Sonnet 130 (Shakespeare), "She Walks in Beauty" (Byron), "First Fig" by Millay, "You Fit Into Me" by Atwood, Puck's closing soliloquy of Midsummer Night's Dream, and the first three stanzas of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (Eliot).
I had a list at one point, somewhere, of other poems I wanted to memorize. Stars only know what's happened to that; odds are it'll turn up right about the time I get it reconstructed anyway. To that end, I figure the easiest way to find it is to rewrite it, so here goes:
the first 18 lines of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in Middle English (I knew it once)
I uh... I kinda want to memorize, you know, all of Shakespeare's sonnets. For the sake of my sanity, though, I'll narrow it specifically to 1, 18, 29, 55, 60, 65, 109, 144.
"Whoso List to Hunt" by Wyatt
"Ozymandias" by Shelley
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by Keats
"When You Are Old" by Yeats
"The Second Coming" by Yeats
"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by Eliot
"East Coker IV" by Eliot (well, all of the Four Quartets if I'm feeling particularly, you know, insane)
certain passages from The Waste Land by Eliot
"Acquainted with the Night" by Frost
"Desert Places" by Frost
"The Waking" by Roethke
"I Knew a Woman" by Roethke
"Helen" by HD
"Spring" by Millay
"Dirge Without Music" by Millay
"Beacons at Bealtaine" by Heaney
"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Thomas
Sonnet 17 ("I do not love you as if/No te amo como si fueras") by Neruda, in both languages
"The God Abandons Antony" by Cavafy
I know there are others; I'll keep adding to this list as they come to mind. Still, I think that's enough to be going on with, for now.
And yes, this is what I do with my spare time. Now you all know how sad my life is :P