The tutors at my school are going to curse me to hell. I’m requiring my 8th grade English class to memorize eleven poems this term: three Shakespearean Sonnets, a sonnet by John Milton (When I consider how my light is spent), John Keats (first looking into Chapman’s Homer), William Blake (London), Wordsworth (Westminster Bridge), Shelley (Ozymandias), Kipling (Arithmetic on the frontier), Wilfred Owen (Sonnet on heavy artillery, and Yeats (Innisfree). My department chair feels that it’s not within my mandate as a writing teacher; I feel that if a student has some poetry memorized, that there is some basis for writing poetry, and for building a framework for other writing, as well. A lot of kids are having difficulty with the memorizing, though. Many of you are poets who memorize your work for performance. Do you have any tips to share about memorizing work, and building up the palace of memory that allows you to insert new poems in amongst the ones you already know? How do you make sure you do not forget the poems you already memorized?

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