Memory Palace and form-in-poetry rant--

rear cover image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
The Foliate Head

Oops

Thanks to my excessively courteous Southern upbringing and the disapproving glances of my ancestors, I eventually turned out to be a person who--once I'd grown up, which took me about 30 years--is probably a little too empathetic and who hates to hurt people's feelings and feels boiled in oil for weeks afterward if I accidentally do so. So I have to say that I am very glad that Nina Kang has such very different opinions from me because she has given me the chance (thank you!) to realize what my own are.

On the other hand, I feel guilty that her well-reasoned opinions are not mine, not in the least. I find my thoughts divergent in almost every respect from hers as displayed in "The Lost Art of Memorization" (Hat tip to Prufrock News.) I expect she stands with the majority, so perhaps my disloyalty won't bother her much if she ever wanders this way.

Memory Palace

I suspect Nina Kang started her attempt to memorize a poem without researching how people have memorized poems in the past. She failed at memorizing a poem, it seems, because she didn't think about those things and develop additional tricks that worked for her. It's not that hard if you use some of the tools developed over the centuries. And I'm sure Nina has a much younger brain than mine, which is no doubt shrinking on its way toward brain-oblivion. Here is a post where I talk about my memory palace plan and how I will memorize. Here is a list of my posts about memorizing poems.

I definitely don't agree that "memorization . . . is something our culture has largely evolved beyond." (And I expect that she doesn't either, really, ending her article with a moment of recitation that works on her like a spell.) If you read a poem, you lay some claim to it. But if you memorize a poem and it follows you over months and years, it becomes yours in an entirely different way. At surprising moments it will rise up in the mind, oddly congruent or oddly at odds with what goes on around you. It will console and surprise in a way that no poem on a page back at your house or on your laptop can do. You will also meet the poem more often and so understand in a more complicated way over time.

Reciting hurts poetry?

The purest, most effervescent distillation of hogwash-and-seltzer appears in these words against memorization:

In fact many argue today that recitation actively hurts poetry. Ron Silliman complains: “To recite a poem, one is required to have the whole of it in mind, to be ever vigilant as to one’s position—the way an actor has to be on stage—with all of its past and its future right at the surface of awareness. One is perpetually other than present with the text at hand.”

If you stay with a poem, if you repeat it over time and learn it thoroughly, this is not in the least what the mind experiences. Why should we take the word of people opposed to memorization? I see such sources as a real difficulty with this argument. Because I have a different experience memorizing poems. Eventually the mind knows the words so well that the poem can flood through the mind and body, and it is often experienced in a far more ravishing way than when read on the page. Sure, I find that at first and perhaps for a while, a difficult poem may have to be considered more carefully. When I hit "Sorrow's springs are the same," I still sometimes have to remember my clue to the knotty next: "Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed." (My clue is the "mouth" of a "spring.") Eventually I'll never need to jump to a clue and back. But when I have to use a clue, I go through the poem a second time, and then don't need the clue. It is now my poem, and I, like Thoreau and the apple fields, own it in a better way than others who may own field or book but have not taken its essence for their own.

Rather than being "other than present," I slide through the words like a mermaid through a sluice of current in the sea. I swim in them, and they are in my mind and mouth and all that I see. You know, I like that idea a great deal better than Silliman's "ideal of poetic 'mindfulness' where the reader can live in a sort of eternal present as the words wash over her." Why have a wave when you can have the ocean? "Mindfulness" is still fashionably hip, but in the case of poetry I prefer total immersion over a wash of mindfulness, and wish that I knew many more poems by heart than I do. Well, it's one of my 2014 projects, so we'll see what happens by year's end.

Suppress amateur reciters?

Ah, dear, human nature rising up again with all its passion! I do like to be kind and sympathetic, but I am afraid that I hate this attempt to suppress "amateur reciters."

Further damage can be dealt to a poem by amateur reciters (as opposed to actors) who may end up delivering the line in a singsong fashion, coercing the poetic line into a strict meter which may not be entirely natural. Thus a blank verse line from Hamlet, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” when recited, can take an exaggeratedly ta-TUM, ta-TUM quality: “Thus CON-science DOES make COW-ards OF us ALL.” The rhythm of that delivery compromises the meaning of the text by putting an unnatural stress on the words “does” and “of,” and causing us to mentally de-emphasize the more important words “make” and “us.” In fact, the whole question of meaning can recede into the background, since rote memorization can and often does accompany a lack of understanding of the poem’s actual meaning.

This idea is absurd. Let's take an example of children (the biggest amateurs of all.) When my daughter's fifth-grade class memorized poems (including pieces from Shakespeare's plays and poems by Kathleen Raine and Charles Causley and many more) that I had chosen for them, they were quite capable of delivering poems with force and gusto and without a hint of singsong. They sounded wonderful. They were proud of knowing their chosen poems, and they knew them inside out and had opinions about how they sounded and what they were about. Years later, my daughter could still recite Puck's song from MND and Raine's "Spell of Creation." Maybe she still can... I'll have to ask the young student of film and graphic novel some time. Take note of this: there was no exaggerated rhythm. There was no lack of understanding. Meaning did not wander off from the words like some unfortunate divided Siamese twin, or like a soul chopped from the body. Those children of ten and eleven felt words in their bones. So can you, if you take the trouble to memorize.

ta-TUM or the Castle of Indolence?

Kang sides with the idea that poets dislike meter and so write poems that are hard to memorize: "Unsurprisingly, then, many of today’s prominent poets seem to be writing poems that actively resist memorization." This assertion relates to the nonsensical idea that memorizers will go ta-TUM ta-TUM if they memorize metrical poetry. (My experience is that the more they memorize and recite, the less likely this is to occur.) The fact is that many of "today's...poets" write poems that will make the reader come a cropper when they try to memorize because it is very difficult to memorize what is sometimes--not always, of course, but it's true of all poets that most of our poems are not our best poems--slack prose broken into lines.

The modernists had formal verse in their bones and were still metrically dramatic and aware of the richness of sound when writing "free" verse; they broke their lines and rhythms against something known. Today's young writers are generations past that fruitful sundering. Too often new poets come of age in Tom Disch's Castle of Indolence (a term and title he borrowed from earlier poet James Thomson), not knowing their ancient, essential tools. You can't shatter form with power if you don't know form in the first place.

Bowdlerization as argument

Kang proceeds to break up some Ashbery lines, change words to be more archaic, and add rhyme and anapests to show what a bad decision formal verse would be; that's nonsensical, as all she does is bowdlerize some lines and then declare them some kind of proof of the weakness of a form that would allow better memorization. She finds the lines catchier but not as good and says, "But it also seems just bad."

Well, of course it's "just bad" (if not completely terrible) because it's not a made poem that came out of somebody's intense, charged play with words but a bowdlerized pseudo-poem! And those roly-poly anapests in the first line that she added have a built-in humorous swing that's wholly inappropriate to the subject. (Side note: The final line, “Into the chamber behind the thought,” does not "end with two dactyls and two iambs." "Into the / chamber / behind / the thought" can be read as dactyl, trochee, and two iambs.)

She does, however, prove that bowdlerizing an existing poem is a bad idea.

After giving us a bowdlerized non-poem to sample for its rhyme and meter, she declares that "we’ve developed a collective allergy to the 'ta-TUM ta-ta-TUM' of the strictly metered line; it makes us think of nursery rhymes and doggerel." Nina Kang, I confess that your bowdlerized non-poem does make me think of doggerel, as you intended it to do.

Another confession

I have something else to confess. I used to write free verse. All the time. I still do, now and then, when I feel as chained as Prometheus on the rock and charge at the sky. That's because the desire to break free now happens only when I've been writing a lot formal poems.

You say we've developed an allergy to the rhythm embodied in your bowdlerized poem. But you know what happened to me?

I got bored.

"Heavy bored," as Berryman's narrator said, long ago, in The Dream Songs.

I don't mind a bit or a whit that others (including Nina) did not become bored with their own free verse, but I tumbled into love with intricate sound and the drama of meter. It's just so darn much more interesting and powerful and fun to me. I'm not saying I can't enjoy any free verse; I'm saying that for me formal poetry became "the flashing & bursting tree!"

Your tree is something else? Fine. There's room. It's a big forest.

Tradition and moving forward

Sometimes, when an art form becomes fey and enervated, the only way forward is through the tradition. For me, my era just happens to be one of those times. Whether you believe that idea or not, the world contains many modes and many paths, including ones that point forward through the wilderness of the metrical past.

Access to power and larger life

Nina Kang says, "Unfortunately, that strict meter we dislike was a pretty valuable mnemonic tool." Yes, it was. And she says, "memorizing free verse poetry often feels like solving a crossword with only half the clues." She's right about those things.

But what she doesn't seem aware of is that the missing "clues" were a lot more than "mnemonic tools." They were access to power for those who could grasp and wield it, and also for many more now-forgotten writers who rejoiced in the attempt to dance the great dance of art with rhythm and song. Most writers, you know, are forgotten in time--most people are forgotten, along with any joy they pursued. But they pursued their joys with vigor in their time, I hope, and lived bigger lives because of them.

In fact, even now some of us are just not in love with the "intentionally haphazard text" and "deliberate awkwardness" of "today's prominent" (or not-prominent) poets but with the idea of combining forms with a voice that sings and speaks in the accents of our own time. And that's a greater, mightier, riskier challenge that any memorizing or writing of the "deliberately awkward" and "haphazard."

Knowing your tools

To any young poet, I would say that no matter what sort of poetry you want to write, you must know your tools. Any artisan should be known and judged first by a basic mastery of his or her tools. Be known by no less. If you don't know your tools, you're nothing but a naked Empress of a performance artist--just another in a rather long, dull line of "artists" thrusting or pulling or spitting or unreeling something or other out of one or another artifice-orifice--a naked human being plopping paint-filled "eggs" out of your vagina and calling it art. Know your tools, no matter what and how you want to make, no matter how you want to stand in relation to the tradition from which you spring... Know that tradition.

Then take joy in creation.

Memory palace, no. 4

Courtesy of sxc.hu and Fran Priestly of the U. S.  That's a photograph
of her sister reading poetry--it could have been Yeats she read,
but, no, she is reading Tennyson. Of course, Yeats read Tennyson...

I've been busy with Glimmerglass edits, The Book of the Red King final polishes (long delayed), the always-tedious author questionnaire, and a bothersome cold, but today I am going to memorize another poem. This one is by Yeats; it's a lyric from The Wind Among the Reeds. I've heard "The Song of Wandering Aengus" sung many times, so it shouldn't be too difficult. And every time I've heard it read aloud with another poem by another writer, Yeats has managed to put the other poem to shame, despite or because of its simplicity of narrative.

Despite that simplicity, one can talk endlessly of elements like Aengus Óg and Caer, or Aengus Óg and hazel wands and faeries, and the meaning of solar and lunar or roundness and wholeness. But I've never thought that any of those explications, however charming and fanciful, did any more for the poem than the clear image of the poet with the fire to make the beautiful and true burning in his head, leading him on (though he may be never satisfied with his efforts to snare the uncatchable) to a mystical goal uniting all things--poet and muse, fire-to-create and transcendental fulfillment, male and female, sun and moon, gold and silver.

The poet gives his life and grows "old with wandering" until he, like Nathaniel Hawthorne's artist of the beautiful, "catches a far other butterfly" and is transformed. As Hawthorne puts it, "When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality."

I love the opening of the poem and how Yeats brings together in one easy motion the realms of earth, air, fire, and water:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

I'm finding that I already know that stanza, probably from hearing and reading the poem so often. The only part I had any trouble remembering was "out to," which has a slight awkwardness, so that I kept wanting to alter it. Probably Thoreau was in my head as well, the man who says, "I went to the woods because," and his because is that he wants to live life deliberately, to suck out its marrow, and not find later that he has not lived. It's not so different from Aengus, called by fire and giving over all of life to a ruling pursuit. Thoreau, too, wonderfully mixes up stream and stars and time and fish: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars."

I'm fooling with the second stanza now, and finding that my mind does not expect or want to remember a duplicate end word in floor:

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:

I just realized that there's a line in one of my Fool poems from The Book of the Red King that conjures this stanza of the poem for me, yoking fire and rustling: "When Fool walked in the rustling fire."

It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

I keep wanting to change "apple blossom" to "apple blossoms" to be a little more earthy and less poetique. Still, I love this poem, and it is, through and through, drenched in the romance of Celtic twilight. So "apple blossom" it is.

When I tried the last stanza without taking a peek, it turned out that I knew it, aside from one line, which my mind skipped over entirely, as if it were not essential to the narrative: "And walk among long dappled grass." I'm having a tiny bit of trouble with "among." Among grass? Metrically, yes, but...

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

I'm beginning to think that perhaps a poet should memorize each poem before concluding it is done. I don't imagine that I ever had much in the way of a negative thought about this poem before. (However, experience says that just because one publishes doesn't mean that a poem is polished to high gloss. I hate to admit it, but I've published poems online or in magazines that I later decided were simply not finished. And of course I felt mortified to think I had once thought them done. Time tells.) But Yeats is one of my heroes, and I rarely think of him as having less than a perfect finish.

Once I know the poem by heart and no longer pause to remember, I expect that I'll be back to my former happy state, not questioning these little decisions. But noticing tiny, almost-invisible snags is another interesting aspect to memorization.

Memory Palace, no. 3

Image courtesy of Michaela Kobyakov of Leonding,
Austria and sxc.hu

I find your project to memorize poetry and then write about it intellectually stimulating, lovely, and touching. You may be right about only poets wanting to read about poetry, but a huge percentage of people are poets who just don't write poetry. If they have the ability to be moved, they can and do love poetry. --Philip Lee Williams

What do you think about that lovely summation? Is it true?

Perhaps I'll continue writing notes about the poems I memorize; perhaps not. At any rate, I am learning and feeling things about poems that one can't learn in any other way. A memorized, delivered poem (in the mind or outloud) seems to engage the whole person, and the importance of pauses increases. One is not longer juggling words and doing a degree of study about how to read the poem when the poem flows forth, memorized. I find that the longer one repeats a poem, the more subtle variation in in pause and emphasis becomes evident. A memorized poem partakes of a natural out-springing like a stream from earth and rocks.

The second poem I memorized was this one by Shakespeare (no. 98), not one of the best known of his sonnets. I memorized it once in college for an exam, but had forgotten much of it over the years.

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
   Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
   As with your shadow I with these did play.

This one does not want to stay lodged in my head, and though I have it now, I fear that I'll have to work to keep it from tumbling out again (rather like the two knotty lines in the Hopkins poem I memorized first.) Some of the difficulty may be due to inversion of syntax, but while memorizing it I noticed other things as stumbling points. "Nor the sweet smell / Of different flowers in odour and in hue" always feels a little redundant to me, so I kept thinking that I had the lines wrong. The stop in the third quatrain gives a bit of trouble because the quatrain splits into related parts, and the jump from the rose and lily to the "figures of delight" (which seem to work both as images and as rhetorical figures) drawn after the red and white complexion trope beloved of Renaissance writers made me go blank a few times.

Also, the turns in thought that mark the Shakespearean sonnet happen remarkably early, and so I didn't expect a shift in the fifth line. In fact, the whole poem with its yets and nors becomes turn, turn, turn, long before the closing couplet and the closing turn from summer to winter, from bright to dark.

Courtesy of Istvan Benedek of Budapest, Hungary and sxc.hu

Memory Palace, no. 2

Photo courtesy of Micha Sankowski of Warsaw, Poland
and sxc.hu

Wrestling tournaments and minor disasters have temporarily delayed my poems-by-heart project. So I've decided to shift to one a week, reciting all I've learned so far every day to review. The first poem I learned was this one, an old favorite by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I knew it fairly well already...

Spring and Fall

  to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

I found this one quite easy to memorize aside from the compression of "Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed / What heart heard of, ghost guessed." And the way that I managed that was to remember to move from "springs" to "mouth" (as of a spring.) Then I had a little trouble wanting to swap "mind" and "heart," but alliteration is a great help there, as "mouth" and "mind" are bracketed together by sound, as well as "heart heard."

There are some things I like especially well about this poem: the strong, sonnet-like ending, the Anglo-Saxon influence on alliterative line structure and words that resemble kennings (wanwood, leafmeal, Goldengrove); the constriction and knottiness of syntax that comes at the same time that revelation approaches; the many meanings circling spring/springs and leaving/leaves. I like the way that the poem questions and doubts language, showing us that the word death, say, doesn't matter because all sorrows have the same springs--in fact, heart and spirit are quick to know more than mind and its words.

* * *

Addendum: Still wondering whether this sort of post is desirable--the internet makes me grasp how few non-poets care about poetry in English these days. Although I note that Iris the "interactive semi-conscious AI" seems to like Wallace Stevens. If you have an opinion, please say so!

Memory Palace frolics--

Courtesy of Eva Schuster
of Dresden, Germany
and sxc.hu--"vaults in
colour from the palace
Alcazar in Seville."

I've decided to work my brain a little harder, now that I've had such a big birthday and am arrowing toward twilight on planet Earth. After all, when I'm writing, I'm having the sheer mad joy of making things up, and when I'm reading--when lucky in my choices--I am reveling in somebody else's words. It doesn't feel much like work, as for good or ill I'm not one of the sorts of writers who sweats blood at the keyboard. Maybe that only works with typewriters. I tend to enjoy it even more when things get knotty, and I like taking a machete and slashing away at what I've made. So neither writing nor revising nor reading is sufficiently unpleasant as to seem like brain exercise (perhaps I should read theory? abstruse alchemical texts? Kierrkegaard?)

So I'm going to re-memorize poems I once knew--should be fairly easy--and memorize new ones--less easy. I just started with Hopkins, "Spring and Fall" and Shakespeare's sonnet 98, "From you have I been absent in the spring." Both of those I knew long ago.

Once I took a seminar from critic Mark Spilka. We all had to deliver a paper, and mine included seven Frost poems. (I don't even remember which ones, now, except that "After Apple-Picking" was harder to learn than the others.) As the course went on, I noticed that our professor never looked at the students when they were reading their papers. I memorized all seven of the poems in my essay and practiced them well, and I remember feeling it a signal victory that we stared each other in the eyes during the recitation portions.

What a funny young woman I must have been!

Anyway, I'm now bad at remembering poems and would like to be good at it once again. So I'm planning on using these methods:

• paying extra attention to the first and last words of each line
• paying attention to meter 
• attention to sensation and color in the poem
• adding extreme mental images where needed (staff music above Shakespeare's birds, cartoon wiggly lines for fragrance above flowers, etc.)
• paying extra attention to the words that start stanzas and suggest structure (As, in 98, I'm focusing on "From, Yet nor, Nor, Yet," a succession that is a little confusing, especially since "nor" comes in for quite a bit of use in the poem.)
• focusing on repeating the lines that are particularly odd in syntax (Hopkins's "Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed," for example)
• using buildings that mean something to me as memory palaces when needed--as, my rickety federal house in Cooperstown and the also-rickety arts-and-crafts/Tudor house in Greenville, the Queen Anne house and the primitive house where I spent part of my summers as a child

Just call me Loci-loki, mischief-maker!