Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes, or to support the podcast,

go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, welcome to Weird Studies. This is Phil. This week's show has a split focus.

On the one hand, it's one of our swap episodes, where J.F. and I each present a piece of art within a given medium.

Here, the medium is poetry.

J.F. chose to discuss Elizabeth Barrett Browning's A Musical Instrument, and I chose Samuel

Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan. But then, on the other hand, this episode is also about memory,

and the practice of holding poems in memory, learning them by heart. I love that way of saying it,

I learned it by heart rather than i memorized it to me the word memorize has a cooler more cerebral more impersonal ring to it

owing to the peculiarities of its historical development the norman invasion and all that the english language comprises two vocabularies, one

Germanic and one Latinate. Or I might as easily say that English has two word hordes,

word horde being the Germanic equivalent of vocabulary. The dressily multisyllabic word vocabulary

sounds smart and proper.

The blunter word horde sounds like something your dwarven fighter character would say at a D&D session.

Memorize is a Latinette word that smells of college classrooms mop down with Lysol.

By heart is a warmer expression that evokes feeling rather than thought, the heart rather than the

brain. And while the brain certainly has its role to play in the writing and reading of poetry,

learning a poem by heart is a felt and embodied action. The heart is a metonym for the whole

integrated system of mind, body, emotion,

and spirit, swords, discs, cups, and staves in the imagery of the tarot. When you're playing

with the full deck, you're using all these faculties, and in reciting poetry by heart, you integrate

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