🔗 How memorizing poetry can expand your life
When you are memorizing a poem, a similar kind of noticing begins at the level of form.
You dissect the poem to graft it into yourself; in the process, its meanings become not objects to be discovered over there, on the page, like birds on a branch, but instead found here, within you, where the tree takes root.
poetry perpetuates itself by becoming a part of those who read it. It can do so only because it is so specific, so entirely different from us, that taking it in expands our own sense of what we are.
I won’t promise you that memorizing poetry will make your life better, but it will make you more: more in touch with language, with other minds, maybe with what you …