Amiri Baraka died yesterday, at the ripe old age of 79. Baraka is on a short list– a very short list– of men who I might refer to as One of my Favorite Poets.  (Sadly, they are all men; that’s another post– needless to say, I don’t read nearly enough poetry.)

I first encountered Baraka’s work in middle school, believe it or not, during a poetry unit in English class where I’m pretty sure our teacher just shoveled anything and everything she could find at us in a mad quixotic frenzy, trying to find anything she could that might get middle schoolers interested in poetry.  (I’ve tried this; it’s tricky as hell.)  Someone, who it was is lost to memory, discovered that Baraka had several very short poems that were catchy and interesting and could be committed to memory and recited very, very quickly– which probably accounted for a large part of his popularity among myself and several of my friends.(*)  To wit, his poem In the Funk World, which I’m ashamed to note that I’ve slightly misquoted on Twitter today:

If Elvis Presley/ is
King
Who is James Brown,
God?

Here’s the thing, though: this post isn’t actually about Baraka.  It’s about how freaking weird memory is.  There are two other poems that I’ve been quoting at people and attributing to Amiri Baraka, literally for years, and I can find no evidence whatsoever right now that a) he wrote the poems, or that b) the poems actually exist.  I have a book of his work– this one— and I spent an hour going through the thing trying to find either of them.  They weren’t there.  I was convinced that both were in that book.  Google has gotten me nowhere.  Here are the two poems; they probably both have titles, but I couldn’t tell you what they were:

Hold me
She told me
I did.

And

You cannot fight
Muhammad Ali
And live.

That last one even sounds like Baraka, right?  I was about to refer to a Black Nationalism “phase” in his career, but that minimizes his devotion to the movement a bit too much, I think; the guy who wrote Who blew up America? certainly never walked too far away from nationalism.

I cannot find any evidence that these poems are not something that either I or some other seventh grade dipshit in my class came up with, or that they’re not short poetry by someone else that I’ve just attributed to Baraka, or that they are actually his work and just don’t happen to be in the one book by him I have or be easily accessible on the Internet– in particular since they’re so short and there’s not exactly a lot of unique vocabulary in there to build a proper search query around, plus I’ve almost certainly slightly modified them in my head over the years.

Then again, I was mostly right about Funk World, so…

Yeah.  Memory’s a motherfucker, innit?

Feel free to let me know if you actually recognize either of those, by the way.  I’d like to know I’m not crazy.

(*) I should point out that I’m a fan of his stuff that’s longer than your average haiku, but I can’t pretend that the short poems aren’t the reason I discovered him in the first place.