When I tell someone that I’m a librarian, I often either get a joke about the Dewey Decimal System, or a sighed-out exclamation along the lines of, “Oh, I wish that I could spend all day reading books!” in response. To the former, I usually mumble something about LOC and move on, to the latter my response is, “Yeah, me too.”
Although I don’t get to sit down with a good book at work unless it’s on my lunch break, since November, I have been engaging with literature in a deeper way by memorizing a poem each month. My new practice was inspired by a friend who recited Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese from memory during a zoom call the day after the election. The words felt like a medicinal balm, her soft, Louisiana accent enveloping me in comfort despite our distance across two time zones.
Equipped with verse
That month, I couldn’t help but memorize Wild Geese. In December, I carried the practice over with Sweet Darkness by David Whyte to celebrate the longest night of the year. This month? The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.
A dramatic turn, I know. While the previous two poems soothed with their melodic sounds and intimate immediacy, The Second Coming evokes pure doom. There’s a dreadful powerlessness that Yeats conjures, amplified by the countless cultural references to the poem. Despite this, I’ve felt oddly empowered as I’ve committed this poem to memory. Perhaps it’s the simple ability to focus my energy on the memorization process so that I can pull the lines out like pencils or pocketknives during moments when the weight of current events looms heavy: The falcon cannot hear the falconer…vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle…
The neuroscience behind reading literature
Or perhaps something is happening on an even deeper, neurological level. In 2021, I came across the neuroscientist and literary theorist Angus Fletcher as he was rounding the podcast circuits after he published Wonderworks: Literary Inventions and the Science of Stories. This is an interdisciplinary book about what Fletcher describes as “inventions” in literature that readers can call on during any number of life events from confronting personal trauma to experiencing deep heartbreak.
Throughout the book Fletcher describes mechanisms in the technology of literature such as the “Hurt Delay.” Fletcher uses Greek tragedy to explain this invention. In short, if we know about a traumatic event before it unfolds (the prophecy of Oedipus), this can help our pre-frontal cortex to process the horror from a safe distance and to feel empathy while still maintaining a personal boundary. This process increases our self-efficacy, Fletcher explains, “when we experience our ability to assist others through their trauma, we increase our belief in our ability to cope with trauma ourselves.” (p. 24)
For a much more complete and detailed explanation, I recommend checking out Fletcher’s book yourself, but for the purposes of this post, what I’m really trying to get at is the power of literature to help us care for ourselves when we need it most. Wonderworks hinges on the concept of prose and poetry not as texts to close read, dissect, or analyze, but rather, as therapeutics.
Doom poetry beats doom scrolling?
Especially of late, I completely understand the impulse to numb out and scroll through your feed at the end of the day or when you wake in the morning. I can also understand, with the way our information feeds are broken up and designed to capture our attention in leap-frog bursts, why it is so difficult for many of us (not just the younger generations) to sit down and really focus on a piece of writing.
Memorizing poetry has allowed me to focus on the words in front of me, bit by bit, in profound ways. Much like aspects of librarianship, the process is iterative and reflexive. As I’m learning a new poem, I often find myself re-reciting the lines I’m trying to get down throughout the day in moments when I would’ve checked my phone. I must stay present and attentive to each word, often catching myself when I’m substituting words that aren’t in the poem (centre, not circle!) during the process.
By the end of the memorization dance, I feel connected to the poem. It’s no longer something outside of me, but something within me that I can pull out to occupy myself when I’m feeling anxious. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a Health Sciences Librarian with a deep affinity for the humanities trying to make everything I love relevant to my job, but I truly feel the process has been good for my health these last few months.
I wonder what it would be like to focus on this deeply personal, therapeutic process of connecting to literature in our libraries. I wonder if this process could offer the kind of quiet, lost in the stacks solace that feels so rare and needed right now. Perhaps there’s a poem out there that could help me articulate exactly what I mean.