My favorite winter poem I think—have been thinking about why I find memorizing poetry so helpful, I think part of it is its ability to render experiences more real, lets my talking-brain *feel* snow as much as my feeling-brain does; more LH-RH bonding

Thinking more about this!

Times I recite poems to myself:

-as I’m falling asleep
-on walks when I want to stop and really experience the moment (might recite the above if it’s snowing, eg)
-when I want something to puzzle over to become wiser

Gonna try to recreate my thinking about a poem to see why I enjoy it/get so much out of it. One of the first I memorized, Heaney’s Postscript—used to hang on the wall of my dorm’s computer lab, and I read it every time I went in

Things I’ll notice as I recite this to myself:

It’s so much fun to say! It has a music to it: and SOME time MAKE the TIME to DRIVE out WEST; but it’s not stilted, each syllable has its own unique rhythm. You can taste the words as you go

And you can feel the words in your mouth in a really pleasant way, too, because of the alliteration/assonance: “the surface of the slate gray lake is lit by the earthed lightning...”, all those S’es and L’s and nice long A sounds (slate gray lake)

And the images make things more real: if I’m looking at swans on water (not uncommon here in Boston), I’ll think of earthed lightning and become more aware of them, notice the contrast between their white and the water’s darker color.

That’s a lot of what a poem does, make you aware of things: of the feeling of words in your mouth, the sounds of syllables in your ear, the working-off-each-other of wind and light

But I’ll also think about things under the poem, things it seems to be riddling about. When a poem riddles it does it in and through its structure, I think; it wants you to roll it around in your brain and notice new things when you come back to it

So this poem is all built on pairs: words double (some time make the time, headstrong looking heads), and the scene is set up with pairs: wind/light, foam/glitter, ocean on one side/inland lake, gray lake/lightning swans, here/there, known/strange things.

I only noticed that structure after I’d said this to myself a dozen times, and I still puzzle over what to make of it. Which is the point! I’m supposed to examine these seeming dualities and figure out what to make of them. The mystery is the beauty of the poem

And so as I’m thinking about the poem, I’m thinking, “am I a hurry through which things pass? What does that mean? Is that bad? Is it possible to slow down and not be a hurry? Should I want to?” No solid answers, but great questions

And all of this is part of the larger project of awareness, I think: a poem is meant to make you more aware of experience, language, life. It helps you pay attention, tries to catch your heart off guard and blow it open to what’s already there but forgotten and ignored. /fin