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.