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my lost world
I remember the days
of
pencils and erasers;
of pencil sharpeners
and
pencil shavings
I remember the days, of long green
blackboards
and long quadratic equations
I remember the sound
and feeling
of holding a piece of chalk
and the triumph of understanding
fluid
dynamics, and chaos theory
I remember the days, of taking notes
in paper
spiral notebooks
intertwined with art doodles,
between
history and literature lessons
Where is my lost
world
how do I go back
~/~
Like the virtuoso that you
Like the virtuoso that you are, you summoned powerful emotions in this journey from childhood classrooms to "the triumph of understanding" one experiences in advanced curriculums.
The sense of challenge, discovery and wonderment that only learning can bring is brought back to my own memory with relatable images that, like certain scents, can jolt the memory and make us long for those moments when it was all new.
After taking us there, these words punch the heart like a fist:
"Where is my lost
world"
A spellbinding lesson in excellent writing.
it's all group think now
Have you seen the inside of modern schoolrooms… it resembles nothing I remember. It’s all about group desks and pods. No individual anything.
It’ s all Marxist group think conditioning. Gone are the old wooden desks of Dead Poet Society.
First, I think this is one of
First, I think this is one of the most important poems I have read here in a long time. So, if my comment becomes verbose, it is because of my immediate admiration of this poem.
*
The question that concludes the poem strikes me as rhetorical (in the best way) because the answer to the question is contained within the poem. The lost world you are trying to recover is summoned by invocation and evocation into the poem, where your poetic words preserve it after the individual components have passed from the material world. But, as great [oems do, you have spiritualized them in this poem, and therefore made them lasting. We see this same process in Wallace Stevens' poems that reconnect with his ancestors after his geneaological studies; in Eliot's Four Quartets; and in Masters' Spoon River Anthology. And it is not just the modernist poems that do this: we have Vergil's nostalgia for the lost bucolic world in his first two collection of poetry and in glimpses scattered through The Aeneid; and in Dante's Divine Comedy which the Argentine poet, J. L. Borges, believed had been constructed for one, and only one, purpose---to summon Beatrice back into Dante's presence just one more time. Citing these precedents establishes, I think, the way your poem fits into the Canon, and how it reminds us how to summon our own lost worlds back.
*
The ancient Egyptians believed that the preservation of a person's name in records (which, for them, was mostly their massive monuments and elaborately inscribed tombs) that person was assured of immortality. That is, by invoking them with a word, their names, they are given an eternal presence. In the same way as they did, you---along with Stevens, Eliot, Vergil and Dante---show us how our lost worlds are only a word away, a word of evocation. In my own life, two particular periods are the most precious to me, and have often seemed the most remote and unrecoverable (when I am at my weakest which, in old age, seems to be happening too often); and your poem has reminded me that these two periods are not lost to me, they are entirely recoverable as long as I put words to them, and put them into my words. And for that reminder, and an example how to do so, I thank you most wholeheartedly and enthusiastically.
J-Called
smiling ear to ear
You always knock my socks off, and I know how fond you are of socks. No pun intended. But it’s true. I’m smiling ear to ear right now. And all I can say, is thank you.
This is one of the most
This is one of the most gracious replies I have received to a comment of mine, and I am most grateful.
J-Called