‘until the mind recites it as it recites itself’

’A poem is meant to be read and read again and again, to be run through the mind until it is part of the mind, until the mind recites it as it recites itself.’ C.K.Williams.

I’ve started learning poems off by heart. I had to do it a long time ago for exams, and I’ve chosen to do it again. Not for any test, for my own pleasure. I like the difficulty, I like having the lines and stanzas in my head, the deep immersion in the language. It slows you down, slow enough to notice whatever passes you by on the first few readings.

Camille Ralphs, in a London Magazine interview, talks about slow reading in a digital age: ‘We process information faster on a computer screen because the way the internet encourages us to meet with information is very two-dimensional. It requires you yourself to have a high-processing speed which poetry defies. Poetry asks for the opposite.’ Joe Moran has also said something of the sort: ‘Poets and lyrically minded prose writers see the written word rather as Quaker worship sees the spoken word: they think it more powerful if it emerges out of and is separated by silence. Writing and reading online, we struggle to find this silence..’

Of course, learning by heart has an old-fashioned feeling to it. In the UK, it’s been one of the favoured ideas of the educational reactionaries in the last ten years, and I prefer not to sit on the same side of the fence as Michael Gove. So I’ll take my encouragement from a different source, someone completely unconcerned with ‘standards’ or league tables. This is Geoffrey Grigson in 1982: ‘Poetry, performed by ourselves, read to us by ourselves, is as near as we shall come to the desired drug which is innocent, trancing us at need, with no side-effects … And if enjoying poetry begins with the savouring and re-savouring of words held in a coherence of measure and rhyme, this drug of rhythm and the pleasure it gives are the second beginning.’ A bit over the top perhaps, but better a drug than an assessment task.

The first poem I chose was ‘Fire and Ice’ by Robert Frost (see above). I’ve always found it chilling and resonant, chilling in its detachment, as if giving instructions for the end of the world. But it was also short enough to make a relatively easy start. I’d memorized it already when the recent events erupted in Minneapolis, and the lines became apposite in ways that Frost could never have imagined : ‘I think I know enough of hate/ To say that for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice’

When you slow down, you notice the strength of some lines, the weakness of others, and sometimes the mistakes. Initially, I found the poem online, and the lines I’ve already quoted read differently: ‘I think I know enough of hate/ To know that for destruction ice…’. It bothered me – I didn’t think Frost would have been clumsy enough to write ‘know’ in consecutive lines. It just didn’t sound right, and when I checked my Penguin copy it was ‘say’, not ‘know’. The online version was incorrect, and it felt wrong as I said it, because learning by heart means reciting aloud to yourself. Here’s Joe Moran again:

’ Reading aloud slows you down and obliges you to notice the words, to start giving them the kind of attention the writer gave them… Online writing is often designed to be mined for its “take home” or “takeaway” lesson…. Most below-the-line comment focuses on whether the commenter agrees with the writer. It rarely mentions what a piece of writing was actually like to read. To a slow reader, the medium can’t be detached from its message in this way. A piece of writing is not simply a “take” on something, but a rhetorical exercise in pace, rhythm, tone, texture and voice.’

Obliges you to notice the words.. so that, in effect, memorising is the beginning of a kind of close reading too, implicitly asking ‘Which word here, and why?’ You notice where you get stuck, and where the lines almost seem to memorise themselves. Is that the same as recognising the weak lines and the successful ones? I’m not sure yet.