I memorize a poem or section of prose a day, but that’s kind of a lie. While it’s true I do memorize a poem or section of prose a day, it seems like I’m saying I memorize, from start to finish, in only one day. In reality, the process is different than that. But before I get to how I memorize a poem, I want to get to the Why.

Krashen

Stephen Krashen is a smart cookie. He says that we don’t learn languages, we acquire them. Acquisition doesn’t come from a language class or a grammar book, but from immersion and something he calls comprehensible input.

Comprehensible input is simple. When learning a language, take something you can understand about 60-90% of and use that as your input. Your brain will naturally fill in what you don’t understand using what you do understand, and given enough time you will eventually climb the ladder of comprehension. New comprehension only comes by extending yourself into the uncomfortable territory within your target language. Only by extending yourself into uncomfortable territory does your brain do what it does best, connect the dots and acquire the language.

Poetry and Poetic Prose as a Second Language

Something I’ve noticed about written prose is a kind of switching in the voice on the page. It’s almost like a form of crazy talk. You’ll have a section of hum-drum action followed by spurts of beautiful, poetic language that, if we spoke them aloud, would sound insane, but because they are written on the page, they make us weep. Great authors do this sort of switching as a means of storytelling, shaping the voice itself to clue us in on where we are in the story and what is about to occur. Emotional manipulation at its finest.

But something is very strange about poetry and poetic prose. It isn’t like the hum-drum storytelling many of us can naturally do. It’s much more dense and complicated. A great poem might call upon Ovid, Shakespeare, the fear of death, of facing God in judgment, and the thrill of a gamble all at the same time through the shape and texture of language. It isn’t a linear way of thinking, but instead uses very different tools of language than we use in our everyday lives. It is inappropriate and absurd to speak in the poetic fashion found in poetry and throughout poetic prose and it is a form of communication we rarely see or hear.

When I speak pragmatically, in the colloquial tongue we all share, I speak in a sort of pidgin. English, when you think of it, is a collection of very distinct dialects which join together in a common tongue. For example, when a Medical Doctor speaks to another Medical Doctor, I don’t understand what they’re saying. Or when a Theologian and another Theologian speak, such as if they were to say, “I’m not interested in getting into a logomachy with you Phil, but my point regarding the distinction between supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism stands,” it can feel like another language.

For the life of me, I can’t see the difference between Krashen’s theory of language acquisition working between languages like Spanish or Russian and this sort of specialized communication of poetry, other than that the target language is technically considerably closer to our native tongue—colloquial English.

Input Baby, Input All the Way

The key to acquiring language is input. After some set time (which varies, based on how distant the target language is from your native language and your natural ability), you will not only understand the target language, but be able to speak it. This happens naturally and output, or speaking and writing, should be seen as a way of learning. Meaning, for poetry and poetic prose, it is far more productive to limit myself to input than trying to learn through writing.

I first had this idea with prose and poetry a few years ago. To understand how acquisition works, I started reading a Spanish version of Harry Potter along with an English version. I would read a chapter a few times. First, the English, then the Spanish and English, then the Spanish. Every time more and more of the target language sunk in and I was picking up vocabulary at a rate that makes Duolingo look like a complete scam. After about 3 weeks of this I became extremely confident that if I stuck with it, after reading all seven of the books and branching out into movies and podcasts, I would be able to speak Spanish without ever looking at a Spanish Grammar. I could just feel my brain absorbing the language, without effort.

However, instead of continuing with Spanish, I decided to switch gears and instead push into English. Like I said, thinking of English Poetry and Poetic Prose as another language means that all I need to do to begin writing it is receive a LOT of input over a long period of time. After what I’m targeting to be 500 hours, I can then begin output.

Why I Memorize

Now, why do I memorize instead of just read? Krashen says memorization, such as you might see in a boring French class, isn’t helpful. Reading and listening to a diverse palette of the language over a long period is what makes acquisition occur. It seems like I’m contradicting Krashen.

Let’s break this down into two parts. First, I do read; I read a lot. I read poetry collections and novels, I read the back of cereal boxes, I read the inside of my shoes. The primary way I process the world is through reading and, to Krashen’s point, my acquisition of higher levels of English has been primarily through reading. But poetry, to me, is a bit different.

In my experience, a great poem might take 100 readings before it can be fully comprehended, and sometimes even more can be discovered at different points in life as we ourselves grow into the poems. Every time I read a great poem, more is absorbed, more is discovered. What appears on the surface to be a simple thing suddenly unfolds over and over again, and more and more is poured out of the poem itself. For me, the only way I’ve successfully been able to fully comprehend a poem is to absorb it through memory and to meditate on it in my real, lived life. Only through extended meditation inside of my lived life have I been able to pierce poetry all the way down and absorb it into my arsenal of thought. Because of this, focusing on intensive memorization at an intense speed has increased my input dramatically and I believe is helping me to pick up and comprehend poems faster and faster.

Memorizing, surprisingly, is simple and easy to do, and in the next post I’ll explain how I memorize so much poetry and prose so consistently.