Inspired in part by our own Mr. Bentley, I've been working on memorizing. (poking around for tips online, I found mostly vapid slop, but this was useful, and is pretty similar to tips Bentley has given me previously.)
I'm trying not to waste too much time kicking myself for not doing this more when I was younger and my memory was stickier. In my teens I would pick up lines by accident. The first two lines of Donne's Holy Sonnet 14 have been in my head for half a lifetime. I once woke up with the last two lines from Ulysses stuck in my head, with no clue where they came from or what they belonged to. That being the age before the internets, I couldn't just look the damn things up. Two months later I stumbled on the poem again by accident, and had a 'ahhhhhhhhh' type moment.
Anyway, last week I nailed down Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, which is kindof cheating, as the first stanza and a half were already stuck in my head from those teenage years. I almost have holy sonnet 14.
Anyone else care to join in this project?
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So currently my little iPod nano thing is full of five hours of sound recordings of Disneyland rides that this guy put together. Some of them are old, some new, many from rides and things that don't exist anymore. One is from the old Circlevision movie that's called "These United States" or something, and the narrator recites the poem that's on the Statue of Liberty, that ends "I lift my lamp beside the golden door." That's gotten inadvertently memorized.
But mostly I just have every word the "ghost host" says in the Haunted Mansion memorized.
N.b. from my college days: memorizing Whitman is slightly more difficult than memorizing poetry phonetically from a language you don't understand.
My mom use to write my speeches for Chinese school speech competitions and tape record them for me to listen and memorize. I had no idea what they were about or what most of the words meant but would just memorize the sounds and intonations. I never got below 3rd place. This would be an interesting experiment in re your N.b from your college days. Why would Walt Whitman be more difficult? I don't have much experience with poetry or memorizing poetry to know.
ps. this experiment is begging us to get together and test out the fruits of our labor. Second weekend of October at Thi's place, anyone?
That's funny - I found it pretty easy to memorize pieces of Chaucer in Middle English (also from a tape), but memorizing even a tiny chunk of Whitman is largely beyond me. His rhythm is so weird it just doesn't stick.
And October it is. I'll be here.
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