Are you able to recite any poems by heart?
This is part of the 190 Questions project. Every week I explore, research, and contemplate one question from the poet Terrance Hayes' lecture "Questions for Reflection on a Century of Poetry."
Untitled Reflection
I wish the poetry of Kim Addonizio
eroded all the monotony of Catholic prayers.
Hiding somewhere in the walnut half –
As soon as
one word is muttered
I can – and do – recite the whole god damned thing.
Methodically, like prayer,
digging a new reservoir and
filling it with words to float or front stroke or bellyflop in.
Now, when someone asks,
“What happened,”
I say, “happened once. So now it’s best”
Last year, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to learn a poem by heart. I cannot explain to you why, in a college creative writing course, Kim Addonizio’s “Stolen Moments” blew my world open, but it did.
This was the poem I learned to recite by heart last year.
The way I learn things, maybe unsurprisingly, is by writing them down. It took about seven pages and less than 30 days.
It’s easier than you think.
I became more interested in memorizing poetry after seeing Tiago Rodrigues’s show “By Heart” at BAM in 2021.
At the beginning of the show, he asks for ten volunteers, who come down from their perch as the audience and sit in an arc of chairs on the floor/stage. Each one is given a line of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 30” to memorize. And then, Rodrigues insists memorization is radical and subversive, profound and integral. He does this by weaving the story of his grandmother asking him to help her pick a book to memorize as she goes blind with the stories of great authors, including Ray Bradbury, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky. Throughout his casual monologue – he’s in jeans and a T-shirt – he breaks to have the volunteers recite their lines, hammering it in with flamboyant charades.
The show stops only when the volunteers can recite the poem by heart.
The run time was typically between 90 minutes and two hours.
It’s easier than you think.
The performance stuck with me. His conclusion inspires me to keep consuming and creating lines. Quoting essayist and literary critic George Steiner, Rodrigues says, the texts we keep in our memory are “the decoration for the house of our interior.”
In the process of shattering my typecast, I’m redecorating my interior.
Isn’t it strange how the poetry project that seemed so limiting previously is so naturally bleeding into this expansion of my work?
Maybe… it’s easier than I think.
Let’s talk about it…
What poem/s do you know by heart?
Is there something you’ve memorized that you’d rather replace?
Another great post! Your reflection about wishing for poems to replace the monotony of Catholic prayers struck a chord with me. While I’ve never been Catholic, for most of my life I was a very devout Mormon. As I continue to deal with what leaving that religion means some five years later, the notion of replacing some of the teaching I memorized with poems feels light and alluring. I think I’ll choose some Ada Limon poems.
It’s been a long time since I memorized any poems. Lots of song lyrics, but few poems. I know Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice and maybe, if I strain, a handful of haiku by Basho and Issa.