memorising poetry

article in the Washington Post called “How memorizing poetry can expand your life,” written by Jacob Brogan. Here’s a short excerpt: 

…memorized poetry resides in the body, as well. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida notes in his short essay “What Is Poetry?” (the title of which is typically given as “Che cos’è la poesia,” even in translation), versions of the phrase “learn by heart” crop up in numerous languages to describe poetic memorization: English, of course, but also, he writes, French and Arabic, among others. For Derrida, this is no accident. He argues that lyric poetry, by nature, asks to be learned by heart, but also, “I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean.” Glossing these lines, the scholar Jonathan Culler writes in his book “Theory of the Lyric” that poetry’s “efficacy depends upon its success in making its words memorable, having them remembered.” In other words, poetry perpetuates itself by becoming a part of those who read it. It can do so only because it is so specific, so entirely different from us, that taking it in expands our own sense of what we are. As you repeat a line or a stanza again and again, signification temporarily gives way to the felt texture of language: its rhythms, pressures, temperatures. These are gestures that say nothing but speak to every part of you.