Committed to Memory
4-15-2013 · Jeremy Pataky
This year’s National Poetry Month poster showed up in the mail, sent from the Academy of American Poets. It celebrates not just poetry, but “the important and enriching role that letter writing has played in the lives of poets.” It’s a good reminder, that kinship between poems and letters—I think of the correspondences between Duncan and Levertov, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Olson and Creely. I think of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which I first read when I was pretty young. Later on in grad school, Joanna Klink assigned Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne, a collection of letters he wrote in 1907 to his wife, Clara. It’s a book I’ll re-read, no doubt learning more about how to pay close attention and how to describe what I see (not to mention Cezanne’s paintings. And how to write a letter.)
Everyone loves getting a real letter. Maybe I will write some, and wait for responses to roll in, and enjoy that particular anticipation. Maybe I’ll get my cardboard box of old ones received down from the shelf tonight and read a few.
One of these posters hangs on the door in the 49 Writers classroom in Anchorage. The adjacent walls sport old photographs of young dirt streets along with color shots of aerobatic ravens (harkening back to the earlier “Raven Place” days before we relocated to the current building). Maybe the need to take a whole month (complete with annual posters) to remind people that poetry exists and is worthwhile indicates how marginalized it is among the genres. Not dead, just marginal. Were they going for irony when they designated April, that month called “the cruelest month” by Eliot, as Poetry Month?
If a whole poetry Month is a bit daunting, rest assured: we also have a day-sized sub-holiday or two coming up. Like Poem in Your Pocket Day, which is April 18, according to a flier that came with the poster. “On Poem in Your Pocket Day,” it says, “select a poem you love, carry it with you, and share it with others throughout the day.” Poem in my pocket? Sure, I thought, wondering, “Would carrying one there and not sharing it but posting Broadsided broadsides around anonymously instead count?”
And then I realized—there actually is a poem in my pocket, already, tucked into my wallet – tattered now, it’s been there for years. “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow,” begins Roethke’s “The Waking”. “I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. / I learn by going where I have to go….” I have shared it with people on a few occasions. I started carrying it around to memorize it. Once I had managed to glue it into the brainy regions, it began doing its work on me, cropping up when I was hiking, or driving, or, yeah, waking.
Try it. Cache a poem in your wallet (or in your pocket, if you will keep it around for more than just a day). Return to it often. Forget the sharing it around part, at first, and just learn it. Be careful not to launder it. Say it in the shower. Say it in the woods. Say it on your excavator, in the elevator when you’re alone, there, say it in a house, with a mouse, here or there, over and again until you’ve got it. Be open to the synaptic practice. Beware, but don’t be scared: your mind will rewire just slightly, learning a new way of thought like awkward fingers that can barely manage a guitar chord and then, one day… bam. \
I won’t be offended if you seek a second opinion. See if one of the 375,000 kids who competed this year in the Poetry Out Loud contest will write you the same prescription. And give this short Dan Beachy-Quick interview a listen. He speaks personally and well to the value of memorization, and to his own practice of it. He starts by writing the poem out longhand. If you think paper went the way of compact discs or rotary dial (it hasn’t, quite), maybe you’ll find this new app released by Penguin to be useful.
I never got around to making a New Year’s resolution this year. Or if I did, I promptly forgot it. So in lieu of that I resolve to retire the tattered villanelle that has lived in my wallet for too long, now, and to replace it with another poem to memorize, and to say it out loud while I’m walking the trails, traversing parking lots, scratching my head while I’m figuring out how to build a deck on the cabin this summer. Maybe I’ll sit on that freshly-done deck and take up letter writing again. As for the memorizing—join me. I’ll say you mine if you say me yours.
Originally published on the 49 Writers blog, when I was still a board member.
