How to Memorize a Poem

Welcome to today’s Guest Poet: Poetry, itself, and how to memorize it.

Recently, I’ve been reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer (London: Penguin, 2011). The subtitle of the book is The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Catchy, right? Enticing? Yes. We elders believe we are the only ones with memory problems, but ask anyone of any age to memorize 10 two digit numbers and the rate of success is pretty dismal. Ask anyone to memorize a poem over 10 lines, and the results are likely to be similar. However, out there in the rare land are professional memorizers who, with their strategies, can memorize just about anything. Intrigued? Read the book. Today, we are going to focus solely on memorizing poetry.  If this topic interests you, let me know, and I’ll write more.

The author begins with the statement, “. . . what could be more humanizing than committing poetry to memory?” 

Let’s pause for a moment to take a short trip back to the beginning of writing – well, at least as far back as the Buddha and Homer (both said to be born at least as early as the fifth century B.C). Foer states that, “. . . the reason Homer’s epics seemed unlike other literature was because the were unlike other literature . . . the evidence that the poems had been transmitted orally was right there in the text itself. . . . Homer, most likely the greatest author of antiquity was just ‘one of a long tradition of oral poets that . . . composed wholly without the aid of writing.” Another example of voluminous memory was during and just after the life of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha). The “words of the Buddha” fill many thick books, the Nikayas; however, originally all this was passed down orally, and not committed to writing until several centuries after the Buddha died. His follower, Ananda, is cited particularly for his prodigious feats of memory. The point is, before the craft of writing was at all common, people were doing a whole lot of memorizing. Some of the erudite believed that using writing would harm the memory and degrade character.

Today’s abilities to memorize are a different story, but the abilities remain, latent and waiting for their exercise. Human brains have a convenient capacity for remembering factors that poetry uses regularly: repetition, concrete images, patterns, and rhythm, among other characteristics. The powers of memory simply must be exercised and strengthened using these features. 

One example that Foer uses is a gentleman who memorized Paradise Lost at the rate of 200 lines per hour. He had no innate ability or genius gene. He just worked at developing his memory strategies and then used them – any time for anything he wanted to remember. He claimed one of the reasons he did it was in case he ever ended up in solitary confinement.

Here’s the method:

1. Start with a memory exercise: perhaps, you have a to do list, maybe on post it notes. With mnemonics, images, or associations with places, commit the list to memory. A relatively easy first step.

2. Repeat a line several times

3. Early on, pair the themes and images of the poem, like you would if you were telling a story about something that happened yesterday.

4. Use concrete images to make the line easier to remember

5. Develop your own images for non-visual words: connectors like “and.” 

6. For words that don’t have a ready image, come up with a rhyming word with an image that can be remembered, i.e., “the” and “ma,”

7. Similarly, attach an emotion to a word or phrase. Foer cites, “. . . break the poem into small chunks and then assign a series of emotions to each short segment.” Associate the words with emotions instead of or in addition to images.

8. Consider using a metronome to set the rhythm (a pattern) that will aid memory

9. Repetition is your friend in this memorization game.

10. This isn’t easy, but it can be done. Making an investment isn’t only good for cocktail parties; it’s also good exercise for the brain, at any age.

You may well ask, at this point, whether I’ve used the technique to memorize a poem or poems, and I haven’t. Why? I can write and read. Ouch! On the other hand, I have used another technique that Foer discusses: The Memory Palace. Lots of fun. I recommend the book.