My mother taught me to read when I was three.   When I was in first grade, my teacher was in the middle of a sentence in Tik-Tok of Oz when she was called out of the room.  While she was gone, I got up and finished the chapter out loud because I couldn’t stand being left hanging.    When she came back and asked who’d been playing with her book,  I told her what I’d done but she didn’t believe me until the rest of the class spoke up.   Her reaction wasn’t  surprising since I’d been reading Dick and Jane– those books with about three words to the page and the father with the hat who was always leaving for work—at exactly the same pace as everyone else.   Maybe I thought that was how you were supposed to do it.    Or maybe I didn’t want the other kids to know I could read.   I do know I wanted to pass for normal since by the time I was seven, I was looking up my age group in The Child from Five to Twelve, and if,  for example, the book said the average person my age  liked spinach I’d try to like it.

About that time I started memorizing songs. I’d take Daddy’s original cast LPs of musical comedies to my room and play them over and over until I’d learned all the words to everything on them.   Daddy had pretty much every classic show: South Pacific, Carousel, Kiss Me Kate, Brigadoon.     Somewhere, and I’ve never been able to trace where, I also picked up a lot of jazz tunes.  Then there were the hymns; I knew those because my mother made us go to church.

But with the exception of my favorite A.A. Milne poems, songs were all I memorized until I was in sixth grade.  My teacher that year, a Mrs. Barnette Robinson (in those days no one called teachers by their first names), was trying out something she called R.I.A.    I forget what the letters stood for but it  involved a piece of classical music (example: Finlandia),  a painting (example: Girl Before a Mirror), and a poem, new ones every week.   The poems tended towards the popular more than the selections from other genres, because Mrs. R. had chosen them by asking her friends what their favorites were.   I especially remember  liking “If.”  I took to “Invictus” too, because of the part about being master of my fate and captain of my soul.   Anyhow, at the end of sixth grade we were assigned to memorize and recite a poem for parents’ evening.      Most kids picked something with as few lines as they could get away with but not me.   I chose “The Highwayman” by Alfred, Lord Noyes.   I was willing to overlook Noyes’  odd middle name because being a romantic little girl,  I just loved the story he told.   And the fact that the poem was so long didn’t bother me either because  in the end, it was just another song.

I can still do “The Highwayman,” all the way through.  In fact when I taught Computer Science at the University of Florida—for more years than I care to revisit—I used to recite it to every class. The students could have complained since, looked at narrowly, this wasn’t what they were paying for– but I thought it was worth the risk.   By that time I was a born-again preacher of poetry and “The Highwayman” was exciting enough to cause some of my students who thought it stopped at the classroom door to think again.   Besides, I wanted to show them how, if they’d only memorize what they loved, they could keep it.

When I stood up to recite “The Highwayman” for a roomful of parents in sixth grade, I didn’t miss a beat. And for a long time after that my memory stood me in perfect stead.    But then came the day—I was a sophomore in high school–that  my English teacher, Miss Quick, passed out a test.   At first I felt the usual surge of adrenalin.   But then I looked around the room at Beaver and Brooksie and Church, all writing furiously, and suddenly I didn’t care about the test because what I really wanted, and deeply,came down to two things: to have a nickname and to be allowed to shave my legs.    The thought threw me so completely that when I looked back at my paper nothing on it made sense.   I came up with some random sentences for essays and marked the first letter that came to mind on the quotes.  The result was predictable enough.  When the test came back, I’d made a D.   After that, I began waking in the middle of the night.  What if it happens again?   What if I get to school some day and I don’t know who Hamlet is?   What if all the verses to “Come Thou Almighty King” just go away?   What if I wake up one morning and I’m not here?

And I would tell this child that one Tuesday when she’s long grown she’ll be walking across the Plaza of the Americas.   And when her best friend comes towards her and they stop to talk, she will realize she has forgotten his name. But she will never forget what she really knows.   And some day, years from now, she’ll see her father’s watery eyes fill with tears because she can still sing all the verses to” A Cowboy’s Farewell, ” his favorite of all the songs he ever wrote.   And as long as she lives, when she thinks  “The wind is a torrent of darkness, among the gusty trees,”  the hairs will rise on the back of her neck.

It was two years ago around this time that I helped judged the regional (Twin Cities) championships of the NEA’s Poetry Out Loud competition. I judged it with Venessa Fuentes, Alex Lemon, and Eric Lorberer. The contest was held on a performance stage in a central location, the Mall of America. Unfortunately, this performance stage was in the middle of the mall, in the amusement park Camp Snoopy, under the roller coaster. Occasionally the kids were interrupted by the grind of the cars on tracks overhead, a few dozen people with their arms in the air, shrieking.

We had thirty seconds to tabulate scores between recitations, so things moved faster than the roller coaster. I don’t remember having time to talk to any of the judges; I do remember occasionally glancing to one side and seeing Alex or Venessa circle numbers as fast as they could. I remember that high school students are partial to Maya Angelou’s poem “I Rise” and Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” They are partial to Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter.”

I hear more people talk about practicing memorization lately, including myself, and wonder whether it’s because our memories grow less and less necessary. Once, people used to talk about creating a “memory palace” in their heads; you added things that were beautiful or worthy. My laptop, however, is more of a memory palace than I could ever make. My husband jokes that an apartment complex is named after whatever natural feature the builder destroyed to put it there — Oakcrest, Riverview — and I wonder whether my laptop’s “memory” is like that.

I had a decent memory as a child because I was an insomniac, and my parents (correctly, I think) kept me on a regular sleep schedule anyway. So I was in bed at 9 every night, even if I was awake until midnight. At some point my father would sit on the edge of the bed a while, acknowledging it was “hard to turn the machine off,” hard to stop thinking. I kept myself occupied by seeing what I could remember: the order of every knickknack on the shelf above the piano, every word of the third-grade musical, every detail of that day I could dredge up. That same year I first memorized a poem I loved, by Emily Dickinson, because I’d found it in a book, and worried I’d never find it again after I had to give the book back.  

I’ve taught two classes now in which my graduate students memorized a poem. It changes them. They clear the poem with me ahead of time, but basically, they’re free to memorize whatever they wish. Everyone can do it, even people who say they can’t. Even the people who get nervous can usually do it alone. A student who couldn’t say hers in front of the others, once, took me aside in the department mailroom the next day and said “An Old Man’s Winter Night” perfectly, as if she were confessing something, or we were having an intimate conversation. My students seem to become closer to each other after they’ve done it, and more open about what they love about poetry. Too, our culture and poetry are pretty visually-oriented at the moment, so the act of doing it creates a little balance — reminds all of us of the pleasure a poem can be in one’s mouth. There’s always someone who memorizes a poem of astonishing length. There’s always someone who goes on to memorize more poems, after the semester ends, on his own.
Memorizing — having something “by heart” — connects us across time and place. Here’s a poem I memorized because the poet Michael Heffernan, when he was my teacher, once recited it to me from memory. And he had decided to learn the poem because once, he had been walking up Dickson Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with the poet James Wright, and Wright had stopped on the sidewalk in front of the train branch of the Bank of Fayetteville and recited it to Michael. James Wright was the first poet who really mattered to me. I wanted that poem, too, to be my own.

Amaryllis, by Edgar Arlington Robinson:

Once, when I wandered in the woods alone,
An old man tottered up to me and said,
“Come, friend, and see the grave that I have made
For Amaryllis.” There was in the tone
Of his complaint such quaver and such moan
That I took pity on him and obeyed,
And long stood looking where his hands had laid
An ancient woman, shrunk to skin and bone.     

Far out beyond the forest I could hear
The calling of loud progress, and the bold
Incessant scream of commerce ringing clear;
But though the trumpets of the world were glad,
It made me lonely and it made me sad
To think that Amaryllis had grown old.

I like that the tragedy of Amaryllis is not that she dies, but that she grows old. Knowing that poem makes me feel I understand a poem like “Saint Judas” a little more.

Thank you, Linebreak, for hosting me this week! It has been a privilege and a pleasure.