I have embarked on a memorization kick. Specifically, I am memorizing some of my favorite poems, shooting a recitation of those poems with my stupid smart phone, employing my new wireless condenser microphones from Audigo for superior sound, and then posting these little recitation movies to Instagram and Facebook. To date, I have recorded five of these little films. It’s been fun and the response has been pretty good, especially from my writer buddies. Why am I doing this? Well, these poems aren’t going to memorize themselves, for starters, but I think it’s a good exercise for the brain, a good exercise for the voice, and I think that there are people out there who might like it, who might find it entertaining or edifying.
I have a history of memorizing things. As a musician and singer in original music groups from my teenage years onward, I’ve had to memorize lyrics for performance. And, also from my youth, I was a theater kid, and as an adult I have continued to act in a handful of community theater productions. Memorizing lines for a play is simply not optional, duh. And of course, as an actor, no serious work can be done on character until one is, as they say, “off book.” Back to music for a moment: over the last decade I have been drumming in a cover band, and have taken on the lead vocal responsibilities for a generous handful of tunes. Oddly, for years I was resistant to memorizing the lyrics to the songs I sang. Why? Not sure. I just didn’t want to, I guess, or I was just afraid of messing up, wanted some insurance against mistakes in songs that everybody knows by heart. So for the longest time, I opted for a music stand and lyric sheets. Recently, I finally decided there was something objectively not cool about this, and have since done the homework of committing those lyrics to memory. No more music stand. No more lyric sheets. Occasionally, I fuck up. Every once in a while I have a lapse, sing the wrong line, or the right line in the wrong place, repeat the same verse twice, mess up the order of the verses, or draw a big fat blank altogether. It’s embarrassing and disappointing, but that’s a moment or two that moves through me and I’m done. Ultimately, I get it right most of the time, and I feel much better about the work, about the performance. I feel more like a professional.
I think almost everybody on the planet who loves music has memorized the lyrics to their favorite songs, but I’ll bet that it doesn’t happen as some kind of disciplined practice, but because of repeated listenings. Those words just settle themselves into long term memory without a lot of effort through the pure joy of being able to sing along. And there’s something easier about memorizing lyrics, probably because other aspects of the music attach themselves to the words, mnemonically, as an aid toward memorization: the rhyme, the rhythm, the groove, instrumental licks, and melody can all serve as cues for the person singing along. But then, there’s the recent (within the last few decades) proliferation of the Karaoke bar. I am sure that a lot of performers here have the words down–but there is always a screen with lyrics and most folks, I’m betting, refer to those screens while they sing.
I’m also betting that most folks in their day to day lives are not memorizing poems.
Poetry memorization used to be a staple of English Language Arts education, but even as old as I am, I remember very few instances when I was asked (as an assignment) to memorize a poem. Students traditionally have had to memorize tons of crap: dates, names, places, historical events, formulas, plot lines, literary terms, definitions of things–but somewhere along the line, while it never disappeared, rote memorization fell out of favor, I think, as progressive educators leaned in on more constructivist pedagogies. And while, as an educator myself, I agreed with that general trend, something was lost, I believe, in particular with the absence of poetry memorization.
I very briefly rediscovered the benefits of memorizing poetry somewhat accidentally about 38 years ago. Working on my Masters of Arts in Teaching, I was short a single elective in my discipline toward my degree, so I took a class being taught during the summer from the Lewis and Clark College Theater guy, a class called “Oral Interpretation.” Essentially, the core activity in that class was reciting things to each other, either by reading something we had practiced out loud, or by a mandatory recitation from memory. The poem I memorized for that one assignment, “14” from John Berryman’s Dreamsongs, is STILL in my brain, for some reason, more so than any lines I have ever memorized for a play! I can’t tell you how many times I have pulled out that Berryman poem as a kind of party trick, for the benefit and entertainment of friends, sure, but maybe far more often for my own benefit and entertainment. Lately, I’ve been practicing it daily in preparation for the sixth or another future installment of my Instagram series.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, there’s a group of resistance “fighters” against the repressive, book outlawing and book burning powers-that-be, who hide themselves away in the forest and make as their individual quests in life to BE a particular literary classic, meaning that the individuals in this group are responsible for memorizing a single book in its entirety, and by doing so, preserve it, until at some point, obviously, the book they have memorized would have to be learned by someone younger, etc. etc., until the possible future day when books are no longer illegal. I feel sorry for the fool who gets assigned War And Peace. Anyway–I make this tangential allusion to make a point about the potential benefit of memorizing poetry: the poem is always with you, is always within reach, and if it’s shared, aspects of it, if not the whole of it, are carried then by others. In this way it exists independently of the printed page, the book, and especially, of the screen. It has been integrated as part and parcel of your very being. And if the poems you choose to memorize are of particular import to you, if they hold a piece of wisdom you love, if they are aspirational in some way, if you love their music, if they make you laugh, if you are made happy by what they say about this being human, then what could possibly be a better gift for yourself, with the added benefit that it may quell or dispel or at least delay the onset of dementia?!* What a value!
*according to the google, there’s no evidence that memorization exercises prevent dementia.
