Memorization

For my poem recitation I memorized a piece from Césaire’s A Notebook of the Return to the Native Land. The poem was very serious so right off the bat I was worried that I would come off cheesy reading it and make people think the wrong idea of the poem. So I think memorizing the emotional sense of the poem was just as hard as memorizing the actual words. At first I tried just re-reading the entire thing over and over and hopefully it would stick in my brain as I kept reading but that didn’t work out so well. So then I recorded myself saying the entire thing and just replayed it as I went to sleep. The next day I did recognize that the poem was coming together better in my head but I still couldn’t say it line by line. So I split the poem into about 5 chunks. The first chunk wasn’t hard to learn. After repeating it line by line to myself, I started to get it. After the first and second chunk things started to get confusing and it was harder to learn. I started to put words, lines, and chunks out of order when I said it. I never did find a solution to doing that but something else did help me tremendously. I noticed when I would practice the poem out loud in my room that if I were to move my eyes about the room saying the poem then I would mess it up almost instantly. Michael B. brought it up in class saying that I was using the Method of Loci, which is a method of memory enhancement, which uses visualization to organize and recall information. I would put the chunks from the poem into different parts of the room to read them or I would stare at one space and bring up the poem to just read it off. I noticed I couldn’t stare at a blank wall because it would in turn make my thought blank. Also it was easier to control and set up my emotions when I read off the chunks from different parts of the room. The emotions of the poem were another hard thing for me to set up. The first thing to figure out was his tone meant for this poem and also think on his reason for writing it. It was hard for me to figure out when I needed people to “hear” it and when I needed to make something obvious. Making sure to keep my emotion in check while saying the poem was an interesting feat. Overall I think I did pretty well even though I was really nervous, shaking, and messed up twice. It was a good experience to to help my memory.