Memorizing Poems

Do you memorize poetry?

I've been meaning to memorize 100 poems for a few years now...I read somewhere how important it was to learn the rhythm of poems by memorizing them, by carrying them around with you. I read that 100 poems was a worthy goal. It does sound like good training for a poet-wanna-be, but so far I've only memorized two. Which I am ashamed to admit. I think I have heretofore resisted because I grew up in a home where I was forced to memorize scriptures. My father even laminated certain verses and hung them in the shower so we could study while soaping up. And so I have been a bit resistant to memorization, which I am now releasing. I will now embrace memorizing text that I myself want to memorize.

Furthermore, since committing to read Moby Dick on this blog got me to do it within a month, I am committing here and now on this very same blog to memorizing 100 poems. But not in a month, not even in a year. It's going to be a long-term project, but I can (and will) commit to memorizing one per month at a minimum until I get to 100. Here it is in black and white. On my blog. And you may call me on it. Anytime.

So how about you? Do you memorize poems, and if so why? And do you have any recommendations for which poems I should memorize?

The two that I have so far are On Angels by Czeslaw Milosz (which I don't recommend for memorization because there is not much in the way of rhyme or meter to help) and Robert Frost's Fire and Ice (which I have to admit I memorized without even trying in junior high school, and I shared a bedroom with a sister six years younger than myself, and I forced her to memorize it too...I would not let her sleep at night until she said it...don't ask me why, I don't know...but in college she was asked to write a paper on this very poem and she wrote it about her wacky sister making her memorize it so my efforts didn't go to waste).

Here's an article from Jim Holt in the New York Times Book Review about his commitment to memorizing poems (he was at about 100 when this article was written 2 1/2 years ago). His tip is: "the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast..." His reasoning for this practice is: "It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within....And it’s a cheap pleasure." And he quotes Robert Pinsky as saying, "I wonder if anyone who has memorized a lot of poetry . . . can fail to write coherent sentences and paragraphs."

And here's a recent article in Slate by Robert Pinsky about how he misremembered a Yeat's poem, and what he learned about creative writing from trying to fill in the blank himself until he could get to a bookstore to find (and be stunned by) the actual word he had forgotten. It was this article that got me thinking about memorization today...

I'd love to hear from you blog-readers about poems you have memorized, and what you think about memorization in general.

And, I will post in a day or two which poem I am starting on next. To keep me accountable. Here I go....

Oh, and if anybody wants to join me and make a memorization commitment (but I'm not pushing...wouldn't want to push, having been on the receiving end), that would be great. Go ahead and post it in the comments section, if you are so inclined.

More Notebook Notes

You may recall a month ago or so  I mentioned that Kay Ryan doesn't carry a notebook around, while other writers (I cited Will Self) find  constant access to a notebook to be a necessary part of their writing process.

Now Charles Simic has weighed in on the notebook issue at the New York Times Review of Books blog. However, Simic is more interested in the place of actual paper pads in this age of digital notebooks and phones that record any information we want to keep.

Simic writes: "...on a cold January morning, I once asked a fashionably dressed middle-aged woman, standing outside a building on Madison Avenue smoking a cigarette and shivering, whether she had a pen I could use. She didn’t think this was an odd request and was happy to oblige me. After she extracted a pencil not much bigger than a matchstick from her purse, I took out a little notebook I carried in my pocket, and not trusting the reliability of my memory, wrote down some lines of poetry I had been mulling over for the previous hour, roaming the streets. Today, she’d probably be staring at an iPhone or a blackberry while puffing away on her cigarette and it would not cross my mind to bother her by asking for a pencil."

Like Simic, I am a big fan of notebooks. I always have one in my bag, and  I shop for those based on durability, since they get banged up quite a bit on my travels and outings. Then I have a notebook at home for my poems, and another notebook for any commercial writing ideas that I have, and a notebook for notes on novels I have partially written. And I have all my notebooks going back to college, one a year or so. I have lugged these overseas a number of times, stored them at actual expense, and now have them under my bed. Why? I don't know. Every once in a while I think about tossing them out; I hardly refer to them ever. I fully intend to have them all destroyed before I die, so why do I hang onto them now? I couldn't say, but I suspect Charles Simic would understand my inclination.

How about you? Do you use notebooks, or have you gone completely digital? Do you store old notebooks or do you jettison them eventually? Thoughts on notebooks welcome.