Most mornings, as soon as I wake up, I feel the pull of my phone. On a good morning, I reach for some paper and a pen instead, turning on the lamp and scooting back against the pillows so I can prop the paper against my blanketed knees. I grab an index card on which I’ve already copied out the poem I’m memorizing, and, looking at my own shaky handwriting, prepare to copy it again. I write it out, three or four times, enough so that I know it by heart.
I started memorizing poems in the spring of 2020, when I would begin my day by turning off my iPhone’s jarring marimba alarm and start scrolling through notifications: news alerts, texts from distant loved ones, air-quality warnings in Oakland, work emails and Slack messages from co-workers. My mornings began with a monotonous dread that would persist throughout the day. When I tried to read a novel or watch a movie, I’d be drawn back to my phone’s pinging litany instead. The iPhone had turned my mind into a version of a notification screen, and this tumult swept me up, subordinating my moods and mind to its whims. It’s hard to remember how my brain worked before it, but I imagine that even without the technology, I’d have a mental list running: Whom do I need to respond to? What have I missed? What do I need to do next? Memorizing a poem first thing in the morning became a way of attuning me to a different logic.
Before 2020, certain aspects of poetry — how it often communicated mood rather than plot, how it required slowing down — frustrated me. In the shadow of the pandemic, though, those same qualities suited my anxious mind and fractured attention span. Shorter fiction and verse felt easier to lose myself in: I would immediately become immersed in a different reality, calmed by it, even, before starting the day.
During one of those unsatisfying Zoom happy hours that passed for social interaction in 2020, I shared a poem that reminded me of a lighter version of myself: “When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows,” by Paige Lewis. Hearing myself read it aloud gave me a way to communicate emotions to my friends (and myself) that otherwise felt distant: silliness, tenderness, trust. In the poem, the speaker and her husband combat malaise by using bedsheets to play what they call the “shadow game”: “He paints my name/across the floral bedsheet and ties the bottom corners/to my ankles. Then he paints another/for himself.” By reciting Lewis’s words, I became a version of myself who perceived the world with a sense of playful possibility. If reading short stories offered an efficient way to forget the world I was living in, reciting a poem gave me a different way to move through it. To hold onto that feeling, to be able to summon the mind-set of Lewis’s poem whenever I needed it, I decided to memorize “When I Tell My Husband … ” by writing out a few lines every morning before I turned to my phone. When I walked through the aisles of Berkeley Bowl, wearing an N-95 mask and carrying my mom’s grocery list, I often thought about Lewis’s lines: “Stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so/tangled/My husband grips his own wrist,” I’d recite to myself.