Memorizing

So I'm working on memorizing an Emily Dickinson poem for my American Women Writers class tomorrow. I've assigned the task to students, so of course I have to do it myself. We're going to sit in a circle, with everyone reciting their poem. Some students have already emailed me about "alternate assignments" because they're so nervous.

I get it: it's tough! I memorized one poem a few years ago, the last time I taught this course, but I can't even remember which poem I chose! Just goes to show how weak my memorization powers are . . . as if this is news.

Takes me back to the first time I had to recite a memorized poem to a professor: it was Toni McNaron at the U of M who required this assignment. We would meet in her office and recite to her *personally*, which was scary. I chose Adrienne Rich's "Power," which begins something like this: "Buried, in the earth deposits of our history" but then I lose it: I know a bottle was buried: one bottle? brown I think?

The poem ends with "She died, not knowing her wounds came from the same source as her power" or something like that. It's about Marie Curie.

So of course now I've had to google the poem, to find out what it really says. Here it is:

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

It's interesting that I lost the "crumbling flank of earth" and the backhoe -- and that my memory changed the ending from Curie's denial to her lack of knowledge. None of the middle details remained, either -- the damaged body so concretely described.

The Dickinson poem I've chosen is also about death (but of course so many of her poems are!). I've known the first line of "1773" for a long while, but now I have the whole thing. I'll try type it here as an exercise:

"My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality reveal
A third event to me
As hard and hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven
And all we need of hell."

Okay, I got a couple of parts wrong: Immortality unveils, it doesn't reveal -- an important, Dickinsonian distinction; the events are "so huge" not "as hard" -- another important Dickinson metaphor. But overall, not that bad!

I'll have to work on getting another poem, since I have some opening lines in my head: "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant / Success in circuit lies" and "I felt a funeral in my Brain" and "Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me" and "I dwell in possibility / A fairer house than prose / [Something] for windows, / Superior for doors" (that first line the title of McNaron's memoir).

I should send Toni a "thank you" email. She started this.