John, you mean "City of God." It's a perfectly delineated explanation of the Renaissance Memory Palaces that he used to talk about. He loved them!:
To every notion they assigned a saint,
to every saint an altar in a transept of the church.
Glancing up, column by column, altar by altar,
they could remember any prayer they chose.
He'd used it for exams, but the room went wrong -
a strip-lit box exploding slowly as he fainted.
They found his closet papered wall to ceiling
with razored passages from At Augustine.
I love that poem; I won't spoil the end for anyone who might be soon to read it, but suffice to say it gets dark.
The storytelling thing is absolutely key, and you know, is there enough storytelling in our contemporary anecdotal-epiphany poetry? Or in the other, fractured-narrative poetry? I'm all for a dislocation, God knows, but then there's that other thing, the man muttering "into his deranged overcoat" who stoppeth one of three. "I MUST TELL YOU THIS!" Michael was ALWAYS mentioning the Ancient Mariner, the ancient mariner was like a guide to him, like his own Virgil showing him the circles of narrative poetry hell. Look at "Black Ice and Rain" - commentators mention Browning for good reason, but you hardly ever see comment regarding Coleridge - or Dante. Or take that crazy one about the deranged cabby, "Timing."
You hear the whole story, but you also get - in the periphery - the fact that the person is deranged WITH their story that they live to tell it. It's both witness and the fascination of the derangement itself, the compulsive compulsion.
(Admittedly in that one you also get something else at the end - but what? It's just so creepy.)
As to Django Reinhardt, there was one person in the class last night who knew all about the 1913 Duchamp history but didn't know about the Delta bluesmen.
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