A month before COVID struck, I took a course in writing poetry. I chose poetry for the same reason I might have chosen opera singing or screenprinting: It was a subject I knew nothing about and in which I’d feel no pressure to excel.
I read the first week’s assignment. I don’t remember the particular poems we read, but I remember feeling as if I were sinking into a great, comfortable couch, and that I wanted to stay there forever. I wrote my first poem, and I’ve been writing poems ever since.
Poetry changed me. In writing poems, I discovered a self I didn’t know, wouldn’t have recognized if I had bumped into her in my own kitchen. I’d had similar experiences in writing fiction, and in slipping a personal reference into a newspaper article now and then, but in poetry, these discoveries came in concentrated form. Another reason I liked writing poetry: It was fast. It wasn’t as easy to get lost in the swirls and eddies of self-doubt, although sometimes I did.
Prompts, their arbitrary nature, helped as well. Instead of writing about some complex subject I’d been trying to write about for years, I wrote about something simple, mundane, a hand, a tree. In fewer than 12 lines on one occasion, I wrote the entire history of my relationship with my mother, when all I thought I was writing about was a birdcage.
In spite of some success, I feared I’d never become a seriously good poet. I was too old, and I was starting too late. In a class online, Billy Collins, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, said the best way to learn about poetry was to read a hundred poems and then read more poems. Another poet I admired suggested I memorize a few poems. His suggestion struck me as exactly right. I thought of the phrase “learn by heart.” Memorizing poems did precisely that; it planted the poem where it needed to be, in my heart.
My son’s mention of a favorite poem, “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop, and an article in the New Yorker about the love affair that inspired it, caused me to take it on as my first challenge. I read the poem and felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. Its description of grief was perfect and devastating. I didn’t want to forget it. Fortunately, the poem was short and easy to memorize: six stanzas of three lines, and a heartbreaking seventh of four lines. In a few weeks, I owned it.
A few months later, my husband, whose knowledge of poetry is greater than mine, happened to cite the first line of John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” When I heard that line, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” I knew I had to follow it to wherever it went. That ode was the second poem I memorized. Now I felt it lived inside me, that I was my own portable Keats. From there I went on to his “Ode to a Nightingale,” and am currently working on “To Autumn,” which is my favorite of the odes. In between, I’ve memorized “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins; Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” and a soliloquy, the big one, “To be or not to be …”; and to ward off fears that grow with age, the beautiful King James version of the 23rd Psalm. All this seems an infinitely better way to preserve gray matter than Sudoku.
During this period, as during many in my life, I suffered from insomnia. During a recent bout, I discovered an off-label use for the poems I’d memorized. Rather than lie in bed and worry about my mother, my children, the world, I began to recite the poems I’d memorized silently, as you would a mantra. Half-asleep, I couldn’t remember many phrases, but by the second time I went through a poem, the missing words emerged the way images do when you’re developing a photograph. It was thrilling, but also strangely calming. By the fourth stanza of any poem, I was usually asleep.
I don’t necessarily recommend memorizing poems as a way to cure insomnia, but it works for me. It comforts me to think, as Keats wrote in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Even if you don’t believe these words, and some days I don’t, saying them makes it easier to sleep and, as that other great poet said, “perchance to dream.”
Fran Schumer is a poet and writer, whose chapbook “Weight” was published in 2022, and whose other work has appeared in the New York Times, the North American Review, and the Nation. She and her husband live year-round on the Vineyard.