Sage Cohen's Tip A Day: Become One With a Poem

Editor’s Note: Throughout the month of April, Reading Local and Portland poet Sage Cohen will celebrate National Poetry Month by featuring a new tip each day.

April 4: Become one with a poem

A powerful way to get a feel for the music of a poem is to memorize it. Beyond impressing your friends and loved ones with your literary prowess, memorization creates a different kind of intimacy with a poem than merely reading it. Our awareness of sound and meaning and rhythm is dramatically heightened through the repetitive process of memorizing. You’ll get inside of the poem, and it will get inside of you. I invite you to memorize a published poem you admire. (Note: I do not expect that you’d memorize a poem in a day; this is likely to take a week or more. But today will be the day that you choose a poem, and begin the ritual.)

Sage Cohen is the author of WRITING THE LIFE POETIC: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writers Digest Books, 2009), THE PRODUCTIVE WRITER: Tips & Tools for Writing More, Stressing Less and Creating success (Writer’s Digest Books, forthcoming in 2010) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. Learn more at www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com.

Image credit Poets.org.