When I took a poetry course in college, we skipped over a lot of poets in the fat red American Poetry anthology. As we went through the table of contents on the first day of class, making checkmarks next to the poets and poems we were assigned to read, there was a name I hadn’t encountered: Marianne Moore.
She was one we were skipping over, but of course we were free to explore anything in the book, and some of her titles intrigued me: “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing,” “The Pangolin,” “What Are Years?” So one day when possibly I should have been reading Robinson Jeffers or T.S. Eliot, the assigned poets on either side of her, I detoured.
How could you not be intrigued by someone who begins a poem titled Poetry this way?
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are more important beyond all this fiddle.
Her work is not, as we say, easily accessible. But as I read some of the longer poems, they drew me in with their right margins stair-stepping back and forth across the page, their vocabulary (I had to look up pangolin), the metaphors, the rhymes that seldom occurred at the ends of lines, the way she seemed to empty out all the trinkets and treasures from her mental pockets in some of them—in short, the dazzling display of a mind at work. I decided I wanted to write my term paper for that class on Miss Moore.
Somewhere in my research, I came across a poem she wrote in her early 20s. Around the same age as college-me.
I May, I Might, I Must
If you tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it, if I try.
I liked pondering the progression of the title. She sent me to the dictionary again, and I pocketed fen, a kind of wetland. I liked that contrarian narrator. And though I wouldn’t have articulated this back then, I understood at some deep level that the you and the I of that poem were both within me.
I also liked its portable size. So, decades later, that little poem is one of many tucked in my heart. I reached in and found it there two years ago, when I journeyed to a gathering where we were all asked to bring a poem about possibility. And in times when something seems hard, when I’m telling myself I just can’t, I remind myself of many imaginary fens I crossed, and I say this poem to myself.
What does it mean to know a poem by heart?
At its simplest, it involves memorization. Some kind of stickiness, like a Post-It Note or a magnet. Sometimes it’s a petite size (like Galway Kinnell’s “Prayer” or Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment”), or rhyme, or both (like nursery rhymes, often our first poems). Sometimes it’s the musicality of the poem, and hearing or making up a tune for it can help the brain to hold onto it.
It’s also more than that. Sometimes lines or whole poems stick because a poet has provided the words for something that already resides in us. Some long poems present themselves as challenging fens we are determined to cross and own, step by marshy step.
I imagine a heart can hold many poems. But every heart should have at least one.
Photo by JFXie, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Laura Lynn Brown.
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Sandra Heska King says
Love, love, love!
I finally took the survey. I had trouble remembering any poem sealed from childhood except nursery rhymes and songs and fragments of poetry. So I’m making up for lost time now. 😉
Yesterday I posted a photo of my second grand girl (Lillee) reading a book. She’s 8. I agreed to read some of her favorite books (like the “I Survived Series,” and she agreed to memorize a poem together. I’m thinking Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” But maybe we’ll go a little shorter and fun to start… like “The Purple Cow” or she might get a kick out of Williams’ “This is Just to Say.”
Laura Brown says
My earliest poems were nursery rhymes and songs, too. And snippet’s from “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” Do they count?
That’s a great mutual agreement with your granddaughter. “This is Just to Say” is a good one — what fun to speak someone else’s playful confession.
L.L. Barkat says
The idea of pocketing a whole wetland (via one little word 🙂 ) really captured me. This is one beauty of taking a poem into ourselves. Words connect us to rich ecosystems.
This, especially:
“What does it mean to know a poem by heart?
At its simplest, it involves memorization…
It’s also more than that. Sometimes lines or whole poems stick because a poet has provided the words for something that already resides in us. Some long poems present themselves as challenging fens we are determined to cross and own…”
There are moments when I know I will never forget a piece of a poem, because it does just that—names what already resides or invites a crossing. The whole poem, if it’s longer than a few lines, can take more effort, but there’s something deep about doing that, too. I want to be a poetry library, where if anyone were to reach into my heart they’d find the most amazing words—little poetic presences that speak worlds.
Laura Lynn Brown says
A worthwhile and beautiful goal. And those little poetic presences can sometimes be the perfect gift at the right time. A gift that is miraculously both kept and shared.
Donna Falcone says
This is wonderful Laura.
Here’s a secret (shhhhhh). I don’t try to memorize anymore, but you have me thinking that to hold a poem in your heart might also mean carrying an imprint and not the whole thing- like how you can feel the press of a kiss long after it’s passed. You don’t even know it’s still there most of the time, but it is.
Bethany R. says
I love that, Donna. One line or a single word might be enough of a capsule to hold the poem’s potency in you.
Debra Hale-Shelton says
Don’t you love it when you discover a poet or poetry that others have neglected or forgotten? Other than nursery rhymes and the like, the first “adult” poetry I remember admiring was T.S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America.” I guess I was drawn to Hughes’ work in part because I grew up during the civil-rights movement and because its words are simple but powerful. I’m not sure why Prufrock so attracted me. I memorized neither.
Laura Lynn Brown says
I loved Prufrock when I first read it in sixth grade. I borrowed a book of Eliot’s poems that the teacher had brought to the classroom. I read it enough that chunks of it set in memory. I think it was the partial rhyme, the musicality, the images it created, the way some parts were understandable and others were mysterious.