How to Keep Your Brain Fit
Do you enjoy memorizing poetry?
Do you recall your youth, when when your teachers assigned you poems to memorize? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Sound familiar? Or maybe you have craftily blocked that time period from your memory bank. But, like our quads and gluts, the brain is a muscle too. If we don’t exercise our muscles they’ll turn to flab. Memorizing poetry, or a song or scene from a movie, is just one way to keep our brains fit. And the profits are worth the time invested (I know, you’re wondering what the profits could possibly be).
Memorizing poetry primes our brains for retaining other types of information like names of people or a list of groceries. Studies have shown that rote learning benefits the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for consolidating short-term memory into long-term memory (http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/in-praise-of-memorization).
Memorization helps us focus, and improves our working memory – the ability to hold multiple pieces of information in the brain at once – allowing us to comprehend what we read, see, and hear. According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, “the highest order of thinking occurs at the evaluating and creating levels which infer that the thinkers must have knowledge, facts, data, or information in their brains.” With the facts laid down in our brain, we are better prepared to evaluate information and think critically (http://www.edutopia.org/rote-learning-benefits.http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/in-praise-of-memorization).
A regular practice of memory training staves off cognitive decline. For those of you who are living with the sequelae of a brain injury, try memorizing a poem, even if it’s a short one, like The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/178804).
But how do you begin memorizing a poem? For me, I focus on two lines at a time, repeating them over and over. I close my eyes and visualize the words. For instance, a few years ago, I memorized my first poem, Once by the Pacific by Robert Frost. Here are the first two lines:
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in
I started by envisioning myself walking along the beach, listening to the waves crashing to shore, washing over pebbles – the sound of “shattered” glass came to mind. “Shattered” became a signpost that carried me further into the poem. I immersed myself in the scene, watching the waves roll over one another. If you’ve been to the beach, you know how waves behave, so the key is to allow yourself to be there, in your head.
I tend to choose poems that resonate with me, the ones with which my body and psyche connect, like Once by the Pacific. Before I explain exactly how I connect with the poem, here are the remaining lines:
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.
For me, shattered, dark intent, rage, and more than ocean water broken conjure images of the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, where an elderly driver hit me and dozens of other pedestrians. This poem catapults me back in time, just prior to the accident, a portent, if you will. You may wonder why I’d want to remember that moment, but the poem does much more than conjure tragedy ;it speaks to my love for the ocean. When I’m home in Vermont, hunkering down for another frigid winter, this poem transports me to the beach my husband and I visit a few times a year in Anna Maria island. Again, I close my eyes and see myself walking barefoot in the water, the waves massaging my feet, the salt marinating my wintered soles.
I’m currently memorizing T.S. Eliot’s Preludes – 54 lines. I’ve gotten part way through the third stanza. I’ll let you know how it goes.
What poems have you memorized, and what prompted you to choose them? What is your strategy for memorizing poems?
I haven’t memorized a poem since grade school! This is a great idea to keep your memory-muscles active and flexible. Thanks for this post, Melissa!
Thanks, Sarah, for reading the post!
I am you would have to say obsessed with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but that is not really the kind of poem you memorize, but rather the kind you read again and again until bits of it stick to you. “Oh do not ask what is it/let us go and make our visit.”
The kinds you memorize, I think, are like pop songs (or pop songs are like them), so tight on meter and rhyme that when you forget a bit and have to fill it in with “something something” to get to the rhyme, you go back to the poem and look it up so you can walk around with a full poem instead of one patched and mended. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/thou art more something and more something/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.”
The latest one I had to go memorize was the one that you, Melissa, saw me reite on demand in Joan Wickersham’s workshop in Vermont when Margaret Whitford shouted out that I knew it by heart. It’s Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” and since I obtained in advance your permission to use the F word on your blog, I will go ahead, but others more sensitive, be warned. The F word is coining.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And throw in extra, just for you.
Of course the first line is a fierce attention-grabber. I always pictured it as being said by a man in a pub just before he lifts the pint to his lips. The rest of the language is so colloquial as well, as though it’s still coming from the guy on the next barstool, that you barely notice the rhyme or the clip-cloppy iambic meter, which in lesser hands can sound very grade school.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in floppy hats and coats
Who half the time were sloppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
“Fools in floppy hats and coats” takes you, I think, no matter what your generation, to old photographs and the clothes that take two generations to look completely odd and wrong but at the time seemed appropriate, just as the actions of the parents’ parents seemed to them to be the thing to do.
Man hands misery to man
It broadens like a coastel shelf
Get out early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.
“Get out early as you can/and don’t have any kids yourself” is the couplet I took with me as I escaped to college. Tellingly, the one line I had to come back to the book for again and again is “broadens like a coastal shelf.” It is both the only simile and the only flight of fancy on behalf of the narrator in the entire poem (“like a patient etherized upon a table”) and therefore the only line that reminds you that you are reading a carefully structured poem and not listening to the guy on the next stool.
As for learning poetry in school — I don’t think we ever did! I was of the post-60’s “kids shouldn’t have to learn what bores them” school of education, so we read a lot of rubbish. By the time I reached college, I had an active resentment of Englush teachers and vowed never to let them ruin poetry for me. So I read it myself, for pleasure.
Which means that everything written above may be nonsense.
What you have to say here, Elizabeth, sounds right on to me. Isn’t poetry, and prose, typically read with an individual eye? Which, I suppose, could mean that each one us is full of our own fucked up nonsense. In any case, the first line of the final stanza says is all: man hands misery to man. Thanks, Elizabeth, for the smartly written feedback.