Know it By Heart

In a previous entry on performance, we touched on some of the things you can practice to improve your presentations and readings: voice projection, confident movements, and audience awareness. The performance workshop is always a high point in the Writing Salon. Not only do we take a close look at what it means to use your body as a performance instrument: intellectually, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. We also look at memorization, which is the subject of this newsletter.

Of course, you already have some experience with memorization. You remember phone numbers, addresses, directions home, good jokes, song lyrics, and great film lines. You remember these things not because you worked at it, but because you repeat them, you use them in your daily life, they entertain you, and you often have an emotional attachment to them. As a result, you know these things by heart. Sometimes you know them in your bones.

You can transfer this everyday skill to getting your written material "off book." Think of memorization as a full-body experience, something you incorporate into the whole creative process, from inception – that moment you notice a plastic bottle with a torn label - to the final form: an environmental poem that shakes the world. The moment you glimpse the bottle, the writing process begins - and memorization is part of that process. Memorization is about paying attention to details, dwelling on what you see, and allowing things deeply considered to be remembered by your whole body. .

It's important to remember that, like writing, memorization is (at least partly) a skill. The more you do it, the better you get at it. If you've never memorized anything before, start with something short that you like. Here are a couple of examples. One is a poem by Ogden Nash, the other is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. The poem is titled "On the Antiquity of Fleas." Are you ready?

Adam
Had 'em.

Now the Hemingway story, which has no title: For Sale. Baby shoes. Never used.

How much is unsaid behind those few words! As you come to know them, not in the mind's memory but in the memory of the body, you start to feel the depths of emotion, insight, and life experience behind each piece. You come to understand them not with the cold critical eye of schoolroom analysis, but, as Keats said, "on the pulse."

We hope these tidbits will start you thinking about memorization in a different way from the chore it may have been at school. Try it: start working on a piece or two. If you have a chance to join us at one of our Salons - Taos in July, Chapel Hill in August, Spain in September - we'll go into this further, and have a lot of fun in the process.

Meanwhile, to keep you going, we've included some memorization tips from a wonderful book, Immersed in Verse, by children's author Allan Wolf (www.allanwolf.com).