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Mnemonic
I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me.
I was cold once. So my father took off his blue sweater.
He wrapped me in it, and I never gave it back.
It is the sweater he wore to America,
this one, which I've grown into, whose sleeves are too long,
whose elbows have thinned, who outlives its rightful owner.
Flamboyant blue in daylight, poor blue by daylight, it is black in the folds.
A serious man who devised complex systems of numbers and rhymes
to aid him in remembering, a man who forgot nothing, my father
would be ashamed of me.
Not because I'm forgetful, but because there is no order
to my memory, a heap
of details, uncatalogued, illogical.
For instance:
God was lonely. So he made me.
My father loved me. So he spanked me.
It hurt him to do so. He did it daily.
The earth is flat. Those who fall off don't return.
The earth is round. All things reveal themselves to men only gradually.
I won't last. Memory is sweet.
Even when it's painful, memory is sweet.
Once, I was cold. So my father took off his blue sweater.
Li-Young Lee
Confronted with students who have more experience with television and film than with books, teachers are often dismayed to hear--in various forms--the complaint, "Poetry has too many deep hidden meanings. I just don't get it." One method that seems to connect students with poetry is to show them how it speaks to our memories, how it retrieves experience and emotion, sight and sound, scent and smell. Poetry contains words and images that unlock our mental attics and allow us to explore ourselves. And poetry can do all this even if it was written by someone who lived two-hundred years ago or by a poet from a culture different from ours.
Poetry is emotion and experience distilled into intense and significant language--W. H. Auden calls it "memorable speech"--that conjures up in readers recollections of other emotions and experiences. Perhaps it is this function of poetry--as memory trigger--that explains in part why so much poetry has been written about what is gone, what has passed, what is no longer....