Memorization
When I was in high school more than 60 years ago, memorization was part of our English Literature course. We might be assigned a soliloquy or sonnet from Shakespeare or a traditional British poem we studied in class. Not only had we to learn it by heart, but also to tremble at the front of the room “performing” our choice in more than a monotone. Today, as even my short-term memory is problematic, to my delight I can still recite a few beloved lines from decades ago, even a whole poem.
Here’s a question. How often nowadays does reading a new Canadian poem in a book or online insist, by its own power, on being committed to memory? Why not?
In her essay “On Reviewing”1, M. Travis Lane first will “sound out the sentences or phrases of the poems, and if the poet seems to have no ear for the cadences of our language, the poems will sound lifeless. Sound is inextricably linked with the emotion of the poem…. What I want from a poem is an opening, an enlargement of our sense of life, even if the ‘sense’ of the poem is as untranslatable as music.”
It is this “enlargement”, touching something true and deeper, that longs to embed itself in memory. An ideal to aim for when we dare to write?
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1. M. Travis Lane, Heart on Fist: Essays and Reviews 1970-2016 (Windsor: Palimpsest Press, 2016), p. 20.