Learning Poetry, Or Making Your Mind A Canvas

This year, I memorized 10 poems because I wanted them to be inside me. I wanted the grooves of my brain to hold strings of beautiful words like a vinyl record. To be able to run my fingers over the lushness of language that was someone else’s and was somehow now mine. 

I have 10 more poems in my mind, and I find myself quoting them and thinking of them. I think of the “infinite ache” of love, and the “voices of wild ducks” and “Ozymandias, King of Kings” often. I woke this morning turning over the phrase “My dreams wander over a withered moor.” I hold these words, and wonder, what more could I have inside me?

I feel now like I have little buried treasures in my mind, little phrases that sprout from me like sunflowers reaching for the light. I had no idea I could decorate my mind like this, but now delight in my Edo-period wall-paper and sapphic tile work. How gorgeous that Shelley and Siehl are roommates! 

—

In Jose Saramango’s book “Blindness,” a country is struck by a plague of “white-blindness” that turns everyone blind. There is a moment early in the book when the characters have been corralled into an abandoned asylum and one character remarks how wonderful it would be if someone had memorized the entirety of the Bible. That person could recite and entertain and capture the minds of all the blind because they had committed the verses to memory.  

In Theravada Buddhism, Ananda is said to have memorized 10,000 suttas and could recite them at will. He contained within him all the known teachings of the Buddha. 

The Oddyssey and the Iliad, the Tanakh, Beowulf, the Vedas, the Quran and hadith, all literature carried and passed on through memorization and sharing, turned hundreds of times over the lips and thoughts of their holders.  

–

What a precious thing our minds are and how poorly they are decorated today. Instead of the most prized stories and poems, they hold lyrics to sappy love songs, and movie lines, and for many of us, nothing at all. How bland and bald must our minds become before we realize they could be colored with a thousand, thousand ideas?