Your daily creative prompt
Welcome to another Advent Calendar offering.
Here in Melbourne, it’s 16 December – only 1 week to go before this email series finishes. I hope you have been getting something out of it. Leave a comment to let me know if you have.
Today, I am asking you to consider an intellectual discipline.
The challenge is to memorise a poem, or at least part of one.
Poet Billy Collins articulates why it is a good idea to do this in the book Light the dark: Writers on creativity, inspiration, and the artistic process.
“But the very real final pleasure (of poetry) is what I called ‘the pleasure of companionship’ – and this was a way of talking about memorization. When you internalise a poem, it becomes something inside of you. You’re able to walk around with it. It becomes a companion.”
During Melbourne’s lockdowns, when we were only allowed out for one hour a day, I would take my daily walk beside Merri Creek at dawn and find myself mentally reciting the poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins, which has been my companion ever since an unhappy adolescence. Something about the beauty, complexity, and emotion of the poems seemed to answer my volatile moods at the time.
Perhaps you yourself already do this? If not, give it a try – find yourself a companion to live inside your head. If you do this already, then perhaps contemplate why and how these poems are important to you.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” – James Baldwin
Meredith
If you like what I do, maybe put a little something in my Christmas stocking by leaving me a tip at Ko-Fi.