Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0405: How to memorize different types of poetry

Episode Date: September 25, 2015

An anonymous listener asks about memorizing poetry of all types. Can similar methods be used to memorize poetry whether or not it has rhyme or meter? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 405 Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. An anonymous listener submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question about memorizing any type of poem regardless of whether or not it has rhyme or verse. Now, the first thing that I'm going to suggest, which is universally applicable to anything that

you're memorizing with text, is start with the recording of the text and listen to that and recite along. This is going to accelerate your memorization of it significantly, and regardless of what other mnemonists may say, it's really important to get that practice down auditorily and with the muscle memory of actually saying the poem, because we're not actually going to learn it by rote, but the repetition of saying it this way is going to smooth out your learning process and help to eliminate some of the errors of the individual words as you're memorizing it. Now let's talk about that memorization itself, how that memorization works. For each individual poem, you should identify the points that help prompt you and select key words based on that.

So what I mean by that is, let's say that you are talking to a little kid who's supposed to recite something, and he keeps having trouble. But every time you say maybe the first word of a sentence or an important word in the sentence, suddenly the kid can remember the whole thing and they can continue for a little while. Well, if you're able to prompt yourself in the same way as you're reciting the poem, then it's all there in your head, and so you have the prompts already ready. You can pull them out kind of like note cards when you're

giving a speech or something like that. The prompts are there. So whatever kind of poetry it is, you want to find those prompts and reduce them to keywords, words that you're going to memorize that will prompt you. For rhyming poems, these may be the beginnings of each line or a keyword in each line, something I prefer. The thing is that the rhymes themselves help to facilitate the memory of the end of each line, so those don't have to be used as prompts. You want to choose what's difficult instead. And on that same note, for non-rhyming poems, you want to identify the most difficult parts. They could be beginnings of sentences, or they could be key words in cases where that works. There could be key words in these sentences or in

these lines in these poems. The next thing that you're going to do now that you have this list of key words and prompts that you're going to use is you're going to place them in a palace for memorizing poetry. We have the information on how to do this in many other episodes about poetry, quotes, scripts, and so on. So what you're doing is you're creating a memory palace and you're storing images of physical visual representations of these key words throughout the palace. So all you have to do is think through the palace from beginning to end and you can remember these images because they're there in your mind's eye.

They'll turn into the prompts and then those prompts will quickly turn into what you have to say. A good way to practice while you're doing this process of creating the memory palace is to think through your memory palace imagery while you listen to the poem. So you can listen to your recording of the poem, make sure that each image that comes up throughout the poem is very sharp in your mind's eye. And then right after listening to the poem, stop your recording and try it on your own. See if you can think through all the imagery and remember what the poem says. So those are my general suggestions. And if you want some

guided help in memorizing 80 classic poems, check out masterofmemory.com slash poetry and get on the wait list for our poetry course, which is just about to release. It's a free course to help you memorize 80 poems. We have poems by Edgar Allan Poe, A.A. Milne, J.R.R. Tolkien, Keats, and many more. And the nice thing about these is you won't have to create your own mnemonics except just to sharpen the images that we help to create for you. Also, if there's a particular poem that anyone wants me to cover, I'd be happy to address it here on the podcast.

What do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon. © transcript Emily Beynon