As I write to you, in the year 2022, we don’t have to memorize much: GPS leads the way, phone numbers are saved, and devices alert us of birthdays. Say what you will about attention spans, how we are faster and less focused than any other era in history, how we value what’s brief and easy, ever and anon. You still have choices! You can try to memorize a poem today.
Reading your poems aloud is a powerful editing tool – trying to memorize, I’ve found, is even stronger. You get to ask yourself, what lines are not worth learning by heart? What’s gotta go? I’m no actor used to memorizing scripts, and I know there are as many ways to read a poem as there are infinite individual learning styles, but I’ll share what’s worked for me!
- Record yourself. Having a recording playing through headphones is my favorite way to learn a set for a reading. I also want to pay attention to my speech patterns and accent. Sure, in listening to yourself, you can realize the way you say “egg” or “coffee” is insufferable but trying to work through that, to actually hear what you sound like can be useful. And examining your voice paired with the poem helps certain lines stick.
- Writing it out by hand and in your handwriting. I think of this act as bringing the poem to another place and hopefully deepening the poem-shaped rut in the brain. Seeing the lines in your hand takes them out of a font used for daily communication, a font you might subconsciously associate with details meant only to be taken in short term.
- Moods. As I’m writing this, a friend texts me his poem, line after line, as he is practicing retrieving it without peeking. Relaxed, at ease, talking to friends – that’s where your brain exists at times, and you’ll want to bring the poem to that mental space too. Having experienced knowing that poem there in that mindset, not just a stressed study mode, can help you access it later on.
- Print! If I can offer any practical advice, just have a printed back up with you. None’s the wise if you glance down. Truly no one will care or notice. Or bring your book, should you have one!
[waiting for a train with poems]
- Listen. I spent my youth taking out poetry recordings housed by NJ’s Park Ridge library and the greater Bergen County system of libraries. These were (ahem) CDs, and I always was working on one commuting by train. That connection felt profound from go: hearing poets make bad jokes between poems, mess up their lines, take their time drawing out words, listening to where they stay quiet, their silence, felt like the most precious time spent. And today, as then, I’m grateful for others who offer their work to me as a performance. I always feel humbled and moved by it.
[this was a giant case for three CDs] - Learn other poets’ poems. What can this practice offer you? Learning other poets’ poems alleviates some pressure I feel to create, and practicing someone else’s work still feels like I’m training my ear. Memorizing poems I love has helped me answer questions like: Where did this poet go that might have been edited out? What risks did they actually take? Does the first line really matter? In fact, learning poems in some ways feels, to me, like memorizing just the first line. That first line brings everything else forth. You learn one line that reminds you of the next. Then the next feeds the next and all the rest.
- Have no end goal. What is it that’s so hard about memorizing a poem without meter or rhyme? Is it too close to language we don’t normally interrogate, the language we don’t look at directly but know as a tool? And what if you’re almost there but keep losing the thread at the same line? Or what about when it’s just not working and you never get a line to stick? To this poet, it doesn’t matter. It’s the trying that teaches and in trying, you get to dwell.
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Author: Lauren Hilger
