"How memorizing poetry can expand your life" by Jacob Brogan is itself a delightfully poetic hymn. Brogan tries to learn a new poem by heart every week. As he describes the process:

... revisiting words and phrases until they dissolve into mere sound, disassembling stanzas like a butcher carving primal cuts off a carcass, catching myself in error and laboriously struggling to correct it — has become my method. I have memorized poems on park benches and in bed. Sometimes I walk through the neighborhood in the morning, mumbling the words of a half-known poem to myself, sheepishly stopping when a dog walker comes around the corner.

Because the process is as simple as it is stultifying, memorizing a great poem always begins as a crime. The tedium of repetition reduces the hewn gemstone to a pile of gravel in which only the occasional dull agate stands out. But as you run your hands through the rock, the lines at last come together again, and the scattered text transforms back into a treasure, often a more valuable one than it was before. ...

and, he observes:

When you are memorizing a poem, a similar kind of noticing begins at the level of form. Demolition reveals the joints that articulate a structure, the way every part supports up every other, and attention begins to give way to understanding .... Because such details help to secure the poem in the mind, noticing them goes beyond the ordinary academic labor of close reading. You dissect the poem to graft it into yourself; in the process, its meanings become not objects to be discovered over there, on the page, like birds on a branch, but instead found here, within you, where the tree takes root.

Brogan concludes:

Some of the poems I’ve memorized are already fading, and that’s fine. I know that if I spend a little time with them, they’ll sing in me again. Others keep thumping in me like a new pulse. ... I won’t promise you that memorizing poetry will make your life better, but it will make you more: more in touch with language, with other minds, maybe with what you might yet become.

_{(gift link to article; cf By Heart (2001-11-28), ...) - ^z - 2024-07-29}