ManicDDaily

As followers of this blog know, in the last couple of days I’ve been inspired by Joshua Foer’s book MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN to try to memorize poetry. I’ve pushed my reluctant brain to adopt some goofy age-old mnemonic techniques, imagining characters from my past in absurd, or even obscene, positions, as visual cues for certain poetic lines and segues. And, lo and behold, it has worked! I’ve learned four or five long poems!

Last night, though, something even more amazing began to happen. Poems that I had learned years ago (there are only a few) but that I’d forgotten, that I’d consigned to the dustbin of “what I used to know,” were suddenly revolving around my head like old jingles from chewing gum commercials. Things like the prologue from the Canterbury Tales and bits of Yeats and Shakespeare.

It was like I’d hotwired some big memory circuits in my brain, and that, in turn, had burned the gunk off a lot of old funky fuses.

Remembering those old poems has felt like spring (up in my head)–not a full blown May perhaps, but at least a bit of aprill. (“With its shoures soot.”)

P.S. the above picture is a photograph of an apple tree filtered with the Photogene app on the iPad. Have a lovely weekend.

This entry was posted on May 27, 2011 at 4:12 pm and is filed under iPad art, memory, poetry. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: activating the brain through memorizing poems, Joshua Foer, Karin Gustafson, manicddaily, Memorizing poems, Moonwalking with Einstein, Photogene Art, Picture of Spring Tree filtered by Photogene