How memorizing poetry can expand your life

Decades ago, my friend Caetlin received a peculiar assignment from the poet Robert L. Hass, who was then her undergraduate literature professor. He instructed each student to memorize three poems of their choosing from the Norton Anthology – not for any urgent pedagogical reason, he claimed, but instead to prepare them for their inevitable future divorces. At some point, Caetlin recalls him saying, you’re going to be alone outside of a courtroom and poetry is going to be all you have. He may have been joking, but it sounds a little like he was speaking from experience.

If the task was a strange one, though, it was less because of its faintly misanthropic framing than because the act of memorizing a poem feels curiously old-fashioned in an era when few of us encounter poetry at all. Perhaps we learn the basic form of the haiku in grade school or the shape of the Shakespearean sonnet a few years later, but at some point, two Frostian roads diverge in a yellow wood and most of us take the one with fewer poems on it. In general, that choice makes no difference at all.

That was mostly my path, too. Even in graduate school, working toward a degree in English literature, I mostly confined myself to prose. It was only in my 40s, only in the last few months, actually, that I began to change my ways. In April, I flew to Seattle, partly to say goodbye to the writer Lesley Hazleton, who had decided to end her life in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis. On the flight, I began to read Clive James’ “Sentenced to Life,” a stirring 40-line reflection on life with the cancer that would ultimately lead to his death. Never giving way to pure pathos, James – an uncommonly witty writer – revels in the world that mortality has opened up to him, his fate sharpening his vision, both within and without.

For hours, I read nothing else as we coursed across the country. Sometimes I spoke its lines aloud, my voice masked by the airplane’s thrum. Sometimes I went through the whole poem at once, and sometimes I repeated a single stanza over and over. I didn’t mean to memorize it at first, but I did want to hold it the way we soon wouldn’t be able to hold Lesley anymore, to keep it the way she kept the smoke of her American Spirits in her clothes. I wanted it as a long, endless inhalation, and by the time my plane landed on the West Coast, I had it that way. The whole thing, all 40 lines of it, in my head. They’re still with me – I could recite them to you now as easily as I can call up the bemused lilt of Lesley’s voice.

In the months since, that small comfort has grown into the assurance of ritual. I’ve tried to memorize a poem every week since, either because they felt right in the moment or because the moment brought them to me. Struggling to make sense of my changing life, I memorized the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s miraculous “Transformation,” which I’d first read in my dorm room 22 years before. Now older, I found a mirror as much in Zagajewski’s description of a sunset – “(crimson, anxious)” – as I did in his opening portrait of paralysis:

I haven’t written a single poem

in months.

I’ve lived humbly, reading the paper,

pondering the riddle of power

and the reasons for obedience.

Later, on my way to a wedding, I wrote to a friend about the sailboats I saw from my train. She responded by sending Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats.” I memorized that, too, longing to be carried “out / beyond the face of fear.” If I am gathering a canon, it is a private one, shaped by circumstance and sentiment rather than obligation or authority.

My almost accidental process with “Sentenced to Life” – 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. I think of James’s claim in “Sentenced to Life” that illness had only made his vision “more defined”:

Once, I would not have noticed; nor have known

The name for Japanese anemones,

So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone

Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees

Without my seeing them. I count the bees.

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: The three single-word lines that conclude Clare Cavanagh’s translation of “Transformation” – “lightning, / transformation, / you.” – expand and then contract, like an exhale followed by a sharp gasp at the unexpected appearance of a beautiful face. 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.

That “within” is not just a metaphor for the mind; memorized poetry resides in the body, as well. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida notes in his short essay “What Is Poetry?” (the title of which is typically given as “Che cos’è la poesia,” even in translation), versions of the phrase “learn by heart” crop up in numerous languages to describe poetic memorization: English, of course, but also, he writes, French and Arabic, among others. For Derrida, this is no accident. He argues that lyric poetry, by nature, asks to be learned by heart, but also, “I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean.” Glossing these lines, the scholar Jonathan Culler writes in his book “Theory of the Lyric” that poetry’s “efficacy depends upon its success in making its words memorable, having them remembered.”

In other words, poetry perpetuates itself by becoming a part of those who read it. It can do so only because it is so specific, so entirely different from us, that taking it in expands our own sense of what we are. As you repeat a line or a stanza again and again, signification temporarily gives way to the felt texture of language: its rhythms, pressures, temperatures. These are gestures that say nothing but speak to every part of you.

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. Emily Dickinson asks me, “If at length the smouldering anguish / Will not overcome – / And the palpitating vineyard / In the dust, be thrown?” and I still couldn’t quite tell you what those protomodernist, grammar-averse lines mean, but they roll around at the base of my throat, where my anxiety otherwise sits. 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.

Or maybe you’ll just go on living, blessed with a little more than you need. A few months ago, I was getting drinks in an airy hotel bar downtown with Caetlin and Seth, her partner of 17 years, who is a poetry scholar and a poet. “When we are talking about nothing, I / am talking about you,” he writes in a sonnet to her that I am memorizing now. “For instance, when / the weather complicates things, you sweep my / legs from under me.”

Do you remember any of the poems you learned for Hass? I asked Caetlin. She did, and “Her Kind,” by Anne Sexton, came spilling out of her, hesitantly at first, but all there in the end, entirely intact. She and Seth have been together for almost as long as I’ve known them both. When they met, I thought they were too different to stay together long, but in their mutual strangeness, they remade each other. And though it’s no business of mine, I believe they’ll be together much longer still. I don’t expect Caetlin will ever really turn to that poem in the way Hass imagined she might, neither as a buffer against heartbreak nor as a companion in some dingy courthouse corridor. But it stuck with her all the same, exactly as vital as she is, and as full as the lasting love that she and Seth share.