Learning a poem by heart, and what that changes
Memorizing your own poem
Memorizing a poem in spoken word poetry means learning it in blocks of two to four lines, saying each block out loud until it arrives without the page, then spreading that work across at least three nights instead of one long evening.
The mouth learns by repetition and by rest, not by staring, and most young writers who are certain they cannot learn a poem by heart have only ever tried the one method that reliably fails, which is reading it silently the night before.
What learning a poem by heart does to the poem
Learning a poem by heart edits the poem, which is why this stage sits inside the writing route set out in How to write a poem rather than somewhere after it. A line that refuses to stick is usually a line that is not doing anything: a filler phrase, an abstraction, a second adjective the first one already covered. Memory is a blunt and honest reader. It keeps images, it keeps rhythm, it keeps anything the tongue enjoys saying, and it drops the rest, so twenty minutes spent wrestling with a slippery line usually end with the line being cut instead of learned.
Three things change once the paper is out of the hands. Volume rises by itself, because a reader looking down sends half the sound into the floor. Eye contact becomes possible. And the pace settles, because a poem held in the memory is delivered at the speed it wants rather than the speed an eye reads. Spoken word poetry is learned by heart more often than page poetry for those reasons, not because reciting without paper is braver.
Three methods that work, and who each one suits
The three methods that work in spoken word poetry all rest on one finding, and the easiest way to memorize a poem is to choose a method and finish it rather than keep switching. The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, testing his own recall and publishing the results in 1885, showed that material reviewed in separated sessions is retained far better than the same total minutes spent in one sitting, which is why every method below is counted in nights.
| Method | How it runs | Who it suits | Session |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block and stack | Learn lines 1 to 4 until they arrive without looking, add lines 5 to 8, then say all eight from the top. No new block until the one before it is solid. | Everybody, and the only sane way through a long poem | 15 minutes |
| Backwards build | Learn the final block first, then the block before it, always running through to the end. Every attempt finishes on the ground you know best. | Poems with a hard last line, and anyone who fades at the finish | 15 minutes |
| Walk it | Give each line a place: a step, a stair, a chair, a window. Say the poem while walking the route, then stand still and walk it in your head. | Writers who move while they think, and anyone who blanks under lights | 10 minutes |
Walking it is the oldest of the three by a long way. It is the method of loci, credited to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos and described by Cicero in De Oratore in the first century BC, and it survives because it gives an invisible sequence a physical shape. Two accelerants work with any of them: copy the poem out by hand once, slowly, so the ear hears every line at writing speed; and record it on a phone and play it back while doing something dull, which teaches the shape of the poem while nobody is trying.
How long it actually takes
It actually takes nights rather than minutes. A poem of about 24 lines is usually secure after three sessions of 15 minutes on three separate nights, then one run a day through the week before it is performed. Poetry built on repetition is faster to learn, because a repeated opening phrase carries the lines that follow it, and poems made of unconnected images are slower whatever their length.
Advice promising a poem memorized fast, in ten minutes flat, is true only in a shallow sense. Material learned in a single burst survives the kitchen and collapses in front of forty people, and the reason is not memory but adrenaline, which is a separate problem treated in Nerves, and what to do with them. A useful test of whether a poem is genuinely learned: say it once while doing something else with your hands, such as washing up or lacing a shoe. A poem that survives divided attention will survive a room.
Games that do the work without feeling like work
Games do the memorizing work in a session, which matters because a group will not sit in silence with a textbook for twenty minutes and a group will happily say the same poem eleven times if something is at stake. Three that work in a room of ten to thirty:
- Play the vanishing poem: write it up on a board, say it together, rub out three words, say it again, and keep going until the board is blank and the room is still saying it.
- Pass the line: stand in a circle and take one line each, three times round, faster each round, with anyone who stalls simply handing the line on without comment.
- Plant a wrong word: one person deliberately swaps a word and everybody else catches it, which forces attention onto the exact language instead of the gist.
All three are group versions of retrieval, which is to say the poem has to be produced from memory rather than reread. The vanishing board is the one to use with a whole class, and it works just as well on a poem nobody in the room wrote, which is how a session built on Starting from a prompt often ends.
When a line goes missing in front of people
When a line goes missing in front of people, the first move is to stop and breathe out, because a silence reads to an audience as a pause and a scramble reads as an emergency. Nobody in the room has the text. A gap of four or five seconds filled with a breath is invisible; the same gap filled with an apology is not. In order of what to try:
- Stop, and breathe out slowly.
- Say the previous line again, out loud, because each line is the cue for the next one and rerunning it usually fires it.
- Skip to the next image you can actually see, and carry on from there.
- Ask for it, if a prompter is sitting in the front row with the printed copy and can say the first three words.
- Read the rest from the page in your back pocket, which breaks no rule that exists.
Every one of those beats the instinct, which is to start the poem again from the top and usually to lose it in the same place twice. Adults running the room can make the fifth option real by putting a folder of printed copies at the side of the stage before the first poem and saying so out loud, which is ordinary practice at poetry nights and removes the fear of forgetting, which is itself the commonest cause of a forgotten line.
What the adult in the room decides
The adult in the room decides whether memorizing is compulsory, and the honest answer is that it is not. Some young writers with dyslexia, with English as an additional language, or with anything that makes recall unreliable under pressure produce their strongest work reading from paper, and a rule that ranks memory above the poetry gets a worse evening and loses two or three writers for good.
The workable position is three ways of holding the text, offered to everyone and chosen freely: from memory, from memory with a prompter, or from the page in a way that is planned rather than apologised for. Reading from paper well is a skill of its own, and it means holding the sheet at chest height rather than in front of the face, marking the poem up beforehand, and looking up at the end of every stanza. Whichever route a writer takes, the last rehearsal should happen standing up, in the actual room, with the actual light on, because a poem learned sitting on a bed is a different language from a poem said from a stage.