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Erdemten's avatar

Amusingly, I never made mixtapes in high school--I listened exclusively to classical music and had no one to share it with. (Though my oldest friend told me years later that she ended up listening to a lot I mentioned to her.) Musically I was largely isolated apart from some adults of my acquaintance. Funny story along those lines, once I was singing "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," a fun Depression-era song, and my father started singing along and suddenly said, "Where in the world did you hear that?" Another time I was playing a recording of Walter Piston's Piano Concertino, and as he walked by my room he said, "Oh, Piston!" (It's a very obscure piece by a now-obscure composer, but I can see it being broadcast live in a concert back in the 1950s.) On the other hand, when we were in grad school my best friend/best man and I mailed each other mix tapes of our latest finds in the CD stores. And finally, one and only one time did I ever make a mixtape for a woman I was interested in, and of course, as fate has a sense of humor even more twisted than mine, she is the only ex I never ever want to see again.

As for poetry, that also was mostly individual and private for me, but not entirely. Two of my four semesters of independent study in classical Chinese involved me translating lots of poetry, which I have many warm memories of; and when I worked at a used bookstore in grad school, the owner, one of the most cultured people I've known, would urge all of us working there to borrow books from the poetry section on long-term loan. He loves poetry and saw that as his way of spreading it effectively, and I became acquainted with a number of contemporary-ish poets he pointed me to that way, like Nemerov, Levertov, Komunyakaa, and Hoagland. (The only case I can think of where we disagreed much was Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which he considers sonorous drivel and I consider sonorous somethings. It is also possible that he likes Alexander Pope rather more than I do, but I don't think that actually came up. We were more likely to wrangle over music, actually--he dislikes Claudio Arrau's Beethoven, whereas I'm quite fond of him, for example.)

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Diane Casavant's avatar

Your posts are my "poetic mixtapes". They share the old and the new!

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