Memorization

'Memorization is not the act of remembering but the process of creating a memory, specifically an exact memory of a thing, usually a text, and it bears with it the sense that the act of creation is one that is rote and forced, something you do because it is good for you. To memorize a poem may be to love it, but it may better be a way to kill it, to remove the life from it, to make it a thing so known as to become invisible and silent.

Ray Carver, known primarily as a writer of short fiction, also wrote poetry. Carver once explained the dear value of his poems by saying that he remembered sharply the writing of each of them. This was meant as evidence from Carver of the importance of writing poetry to him, evidence of how powerful the experience of writing a poem was to him.

Yet I can recall none of his poems, none at all, and nothing of them. And I think this is good in a way. Otherwise, I am overwhelmed by the thought of his memorization of the events of creating poems, and it seems to me a way to suggest poetry is something merely magical, and not at all real, not of the body, even inhuman. I don’t remember the composition of all my poems, and I hardly remember the composition of any of them at all. My process of creating them is intense, and it is a process of the mind and the body. I lean into the making of a poem. I enter the poem so that I can make it. I am surrounded by the poem.

What I recall of their composition is general. I remember the places I normally sit to write, and when I recall something more specific I recall only an instant of the composition or a single blink of existence where I caught the inspiration for a single line. Poetry is of the body, and the body remembers dully and inexactly. Even the scars of my body tell me little about the experiences of the body. The red keloid over my sternum tells me my heart was resurrected but little else. I carry scars I know well but without remembering the occasion of their creation.

A poem is a creature of the body and recalled only glimmeringly from the body. A poem is excreted by the body, either to vanish into air or to persist as a record. We need to forget all but the outlines of the poem so that when we read it again it is suddenly a new and reborn experience.'

- http://dbqp.blogspot.com/