One of my favorite parts of learning a poem by heart is what I call the gift of forgetting. And no matter how many times I say what I’m about to say, people just don’t seem to believe me. But really, the gift of the process of learning a poem by heart is noticing the places that you forget again and again. Those places that you forget – whether parts of a poem or any other thing you’re trying to memorize – are the places that are calling you beyond your familiar self into a more expanded sense of who you are.
What you start to discover is this: When you’ve read a poem over and over and over and then put it down to see how much you’ve memorized, the very place in the poem where you get hung up – whether you get the words wrong or come to a dead stop – that is the richest place in the poem for you. It’s going to draw you into self-inquiry and self-discovery in all sorts of ways you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to go if you’d gotten it perfect the first time.



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