Tuesday, January 23, 2018

On Memorizing Great Poetry.

I once memorized a poem, T.S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." No one told me to memorize it or said I would flunk if I didn't memorize every word. I was raised after education had rejected such cruel and inhumane practices along with teachers paddling students and washing out students' mouths with soap.

I didn't memorize "Prufrock" in its entirety, just the opening as well as some of the other stanzas. Why? Because this poem spoke to me at a deep level in ways I had never been spoken to before. Each time I read it, it flooded my mind with images and visions, delightful, grotesque, half-remembered nightmares of unspeakable beauty. It seemed to be written for me. You see, it was written about the meek who dream of being bold. About the depressed who dream of being happy and being loved. About old people who dream of being young. About those who like to stay close to culture and harbor hopes of waking up one day to find themselves cultured.

In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michaelangelo"

And so, as I recently began reading a book called Light the Dark: Writer's on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, edited by Joe Fassler, it sparked my imagination when I came upon (in the opening essay by Aimee Bender, called, "Light the Dark") a personal account of all the good that can come when one chooses to memorize great poetry.

In Bender's case it was a poem by Wallace Stevens that she memorized, "Final Soliloquy to the Interior Paramour."

I recently was reading a biography of W.H. Auden (by Humphrey Carpenter) wherein Carpenter describes Auden's first forays as a writing and literature teacher after he immigrated to the States and taught at a number of notable colleges. Auden was educated in English public schools and then attended Oxford at a time when memorizing poetry was required. (I hope it still is.) So naturally when Auden taught in America he required that his students memorize poems. While they grumbled at first they came to like the memorization learning process. They found it was a great way to enter a poem and to live with a poem, as a way of sounding out a poem until it became familiar and its deeper meanings began to un-hide themselves. Reading Auden's biography caused me to think about the benefits of memorizing poetry. I've found so many times in my life I narrated those times by repeating Proofrock's opening lines to myself: "Let us go then, you and I/ when the evening is spread out against the sky/ like a patient etherized upon the table."

And so when I finished reading Aimee Bender's essay, I immediately put myself to memorizing Wallace Stevens' Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, the same poem she writes about in her essay. It's not easy to memorize. I still haven't finished. But because I've been trying to, I understand so much more about the poem and about writing.

Bender describes the benefits of memorizing poetry in very practical terms:"Part of the reason the memorization appealed to me is I felt like I want those lines available to me at certain times in my life—if something is difficult, or something is joyous."

That's exactly what I meant when I said by repeating "Prufrock" I could "narrate" scenes from my life as they happened.

Bender also writes about how what seems important about a poem at first blush changes as one becomes more intimate with it. So for Bender, at first the line she liked the most was: "We say God and the imagination are one." Bender, being a great proponent of the power of human imagination, took that line in a secular sense, as though God is on the same level with the imagination. I always took it in a more spiritual sense, as though our imaginations are on the same level with God.

Later, as she lived with the poem, that line about God and imagination being one became less important to her while the line that comes directly after it became more important: "How high that highest candle lights the dark."

Whenever I read that second line, it speaks to me of how imagination has always been the driver or locomotive of human progress since the beginning of recorded time. It still is. That was always the more important line to me, but then again, I read Bender's "Light the Dark" before I read Stevens' poem the first time. We are all potentially enlarged by what we read about poetry as much as the poetry itself.

Many of us slip through stories and poems like sleek cruise ships cut through seawater. Memorizing poetry insists that we live with the work, that we linger, that we remain at sea with the work, that we give ourselves time to daydream about the work. Bender expresses this beautifully: "We can be so vague in our memory of books. Paragraphs that we loved become slippery, then gone. Memorization was a way to force a more permanent relationship to the words. It allowed a certain kind of magical construction to get in my mind and simmer there."

Then she goes on to illuminate the profound impact memorizing a great poem can have not only on our minds but on who we are as people: "I think we're biologically impacted by language. It can be deeply, deeply nourishing. And I don't mean that as a metaphor. It can feel like something cellular gets fed. To feel energized by Stevens was a singular experience that reminded me how words register in our physical bodies, too. It felt like concrete proof that literature is important."

Finally, Bender speaks of the mystery of the unknown in literature, both stories and poetry. The mystery, the ineffable, is what she loves about writing: "That's why I love Steven's poem, too. It sits between these great mysteries that he's articulated without dispelling them completely. I think a great poem will always stay a little mysterious. The best writing does. The words that click into place, wrap around something mysterious. They create a shape around which something lives and they give hints about what that thing is, but do not reveal it fully.

"Language is limited, it's a faulty tool. But how high it lights the dark."