Most mornings, as soon as I wake up, I feel the pull of my phone. On a good morning, I reach for some paper and a pen instead, turning on the lamp and scooting back against the pillows so I can prop the paper against my blanketed knees. I grab an index card on which I’ve already copied out the poem I’m memorizing, and, looking at my own shaky handwriting, prepare to copy it again. I write it out, three or four times, enough so that I know it by heart.
I started memorizing poems in the spring of 2020, when I would begin my day by turning off my iPhone’s jarring marimba alarm and start scrolling through notifications: news alerts, texts from distant loved ones, air-quality warnings in Oakland, work emails and Slack messages from co-workers. My mornings began with a monotonous dread that would persist throughout the day. When I tried to read a novel or watch a movie, I’d be drawn back to my phone’s pinging litany instead. The iPhone had turned my mind into a version of a notification screen, and this tumult swept me up, subordinating my moods and mind to its whims. It’s hard to remember how my brain worked before it, but I imagine that even without the technology, I’d have a mental list running: Whom do I need to respond to? What have I missed? What do I need to do next? Memorizing a poem first thing in the morning became a way of attuning me to a different logic.
Before 2020, certain aspects of poetry — how it often communicated mood rather than plot, how it required slowing down — frustrated me. In the shadow of the pandemic, though, those same qualities suited my anxious mind and fractured attention span. Shorter fiction and verse felt easier to lose myself in: I would immediately become immersed in a different reality, calmed by it, even, before starting the day.
During one of those unsatisfying Zoom happy hours that passed for social interaction in 2020, I shared a poem that reminded me of a lighter version of myself: “When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows,” by Paige Lewis. Hearing myself read it aloud gave me a way to communicate emotions to my friends (and myself) that otherwise felt distant: silliness, tenderness, trust. In the poem, the speaker and her husband combat malaise by using bedsheets to play what they call the “shadow game”: “He paints my name/across the floral bedsheet and ties the bottom corners/to my ankles. Then he paints another/for himself.” By reciting Lewis’s words, I became a version of myself who perceived the world with a sense of playful possibility. If reading short stories offered an efficient way to forget the world I was living in, reciting a poem gave me a different way to move through it. To hold onto that feeling, to be able to summon the mind-set of Lewis’s poem whenever I needed it, I decided to memorize “When I Tell My Husband … ” by writing out a few lines every morning before I turned to my phone. When I walked through the aisles of Berkeley Bowl, wearing an N-95 mask and carrying my mom’s grocery list, I often thought about Lewis’s lines: “Stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so/tangled/My husband grips his own wrist,” I’d recite to myself.
After memorizing one poem, I moved on to others. By repeating the lines to myself, I could replace my own gloomy background noise with borrowed perspectives that seemed brighter, sharper: a playful confidence from Naomi Shihab Nye, an ambling grace from Jesse Nathan, the unshakable conviction of Adrienne Rich. That year, reality seemed inescapable and inalterable. But I could change how I thought within it.
Take the poem “The City Limits,” by A.R. Ammons. “When you consider the radiance,” it begins, before the poem soars and slows and soars again. There’s a physical speeding up and braking that I felt when I wrote out the lines again and again, a headlong rhythm that made me aware of my breath. When I memorized it, I spent time in the rushing lines and their resonant sounds, lending me Ammons’s wide-mouthed wonder at the everyday world: “the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest/swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them, not flinching into disguise or darkening.” And then, when I came up for air, to a reminder of how to see: “when you consider the radiance.”
In the years since, these morning poems have changed how I live. They’ve altered my mental rhythm, made me more comfortable with the idiosyncrasies of my own mind, which in turn makes me more confident in my voice and taste. Mostly, they’ve made me better at noticing: The particularity of a poem, rolling around in the back of my head, reminds me how to look for repetition and snags elsewhere, to hear both text and subtext. I think I’m more perceptive, a better observer of both art and the people I love. When I catch myself mindlessly reaching for my phone, the poems act as a slap on the wrist: Put down the phone. Look up.
Five years since the start of the pandemic, I now can pay attention to novels and movies again. But I can also sit more with my thoughts. These days when I wait for a light to change, I sometimes feel overcome by my sheer luck: that I’m walking under a sunny sky, breathing fresh air, on my way to cook dinner with friends. In my idle mind, instead of defaulting to whatever demands my attention, I move toward a precise, generous beauty.
Charley Locke is a contributing writer for the magazine. She last wrote about how teenagers are experiencing climate change.
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