The poetry project

Sylvia Plath's "The Beekeeper's
Daughter" is my latest poem to memorize.

I’ve had a strange relationship with poetry.

In younger days, I wrote some. It rhymed, mostly. It wasn’t great.

By high school, I wasn’t a fan. Hated anything that rhymed. Didn’t care for much else. We didn’t study much, and what I was exposed to wasn’t great.

I went to college with a bias, but as an English minor, I couldn’t avoid poetry.

And I found some really nice stuff I enjoyed.

I still didn’t like rhyming poetry, particularly couplets with that sing-songy beat. (I still refuse to buy a greeting card that rhymes.) But that wasn’t/isn’t good poetry.

At least college got me over my aversion to poetry in general.

I’ve read a little since then. I still haven’t delved into as much as I should. It’s one of those things I know I should do, but I don’t. We’ve all got stuff like that, right?

A friend and I were talking recently about poetry. We both agreed we liked it when others could quote it, yet we’d never taken the time to memorize poems. Being thespians, we figured surely, we could do this. So, she challenged me that we’d each choose a poem, memorize it and send a video recording of the recitation to the other in the next month.

Never one to procrastinate, I picked a poem I’d heard fairly recently, when a different friend recited it.

Within a couple of weeks, I had it down. Despite being short, I had a mind block about it. I have been able to memorize huge swaths of words for plays, but this short poem had me going back and back and back to it, to get it exactly right.

I figured I should keep going. My friend had suggested a poet on Instagram, Atticus, who keeps his persona private and publishes under a pseudonym. I liked most of his poems, and they were mostly short. I chose one that spoke to me that was more than two lines.

Did I mention it was hard to memorize the first poem? I worked and worked on the Atticus poem. I just couldn’t seem to get it to stick. But I kept at it, until I could rattle it off without (much of) a hitch. That’s a secret to memorizing. You need to have the words embedded, then you add the inflection, the pacing, the emotion. It’s good to learn it the way you want to say it, but a director may change it, or you might discover a different meaning and want to change it yourself, so it’s better just to have the raw words in your brain. At least, that’s been how I do it. Maybe that’s weird.

I finally got the second poem down and recorded it.

As much as I hate myself on camera and I’m awfully critical, I put them up on my YouTube channel – not that anyone will find them there. I figured it could serve as a passage of time – if I keep going with this two-person poetry project.

Poetry project playlist

For my third poem, I chose a slightly longer poem. Three stanzas, seven lines each. (See the photo for a preview.) Surprisingly, the first part is coming together easily. I still don’t have it by heart, but if I skim it, I can recite it without looking. Hopefully, the remainder follows just as easily.

I don’t know what I’ll do with these poems now that I’ve got them memorized. I don’t know that I’ll have a lot of call for reciting poetry. I suppose it’s the kind of thing that comes up occasionally, like being able to speak French and translating something irrelevant for someone.

But it gives me something to do that’s not work-related (ahem, job-search-related). It makes my brain work. And it surely can’t hurt. After all, it’s making me enjoy poetry even more.