Tag Archives: Margaret Korb

In the first couple of weeks of my By Heart project, I thought I might return to poems I’ve had a crack at learning before, but never giving the memorization process enough time to bed in.

Incompletion creates a certain if-only dolefulness which may trail after you like an incoherent golem pleading through muddy eyes that you finish what you started.

A poem is a particularly potent gestalt, which becomes clear when you swap a few words around in this quote from Margaret Korb:

A poem, and the learning of, is a completed unit of human experience. It is a unique aesthetic formulation of a whole; it will to some degree involve contact,awareness, attention, and figure formation out of the ground of my experience; it arises out of emergent needs and is mobilized by aggressive energy.

One feels the push and pull of contact, awareness, attention, figure and ground, need, aggression ever-so strongly in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover ^[2].

Here’s a first read-aloud after taking it for a walk around the block a couple of times.

Background soundscape by Jani Hirvonen: http://omhasva.blogspot.co.uk/

I was surprised to discover that some of my previous attempts to learn the poem had left faint paths in the neural circuitry, a kind of introceptive deja-vu.

The art of memory, we know from the ancients, is that of “inner writing”, employing places and images to plant and cultivate our memory gardens ^[1]. So even a day or two, ten years ago, attempting to learn this poem by heart must have cleared the beginning of the headspace one needs for a poem (or anything else) to take root.