On the surface, this bizarre Australian poem from 1917 is a light
satire about a society of “Glugs” who are basically insufferable Edwardians.
So the Glugs continued, with greed and glee,
To buy cheap clothing, pills, and tea;
Till every Glug in the land of Gosh
Had three clean shirts and a fourth in the wash.
And they all grew idle, and fond of ease,
And easy to swindle, and hard to please
It’s like Dr. Seuss for grownups. Better.
But at 14,500 words, this (minor) epic offers more than just
criticism. So, back in 2007 or so, I decided to memorize the whole thing.
A Locus for Every Line (Bad Idea)
I started off using loci. This was my second big memory project, early
in my memory career, and loci were still magic. Yes, the rhythms and
rhymes would help. But I dutifully began to choose one or two visual
mnemonics per line.
Let him who is minded to meet with a Glug,
Pluck three hardy hairs from a rabbit-skin rug;
Blow one to the South, and one to the West,
Then burn another and swallow the rest.
I have vague memories of a rabbit, a sombrero, a cowboy hat, something
on fire…
It was astoundingly tedious. Recitation meant constantly switching
gears from visual mode to oral mode. Perhaps I simply wasn’t good
enough at making and reading my mnemonics. But it felt like the rhythm
and rhyme were snapping under the strain. After ten stanzas or so, I
gave up. For awhile.
Oral Mnemonics (Rhythm and Rhyme)
Meanwhile, my efforts with my first big memory project, the Gospel
of Mark, eventually led me to the world of oral tradition. The Greeks
and Romans may have relied on loci, but other cultures used oral,
not visual, mnemonics. Rhythm, rhyme, music — these activate a whole
different part of the brain. Oral peoples could memorize entire epics.
I returned to the Glugs, and tried repeating the lines out loud. I
couldn’t believe it. Stanza after stanza clicked into place! I was
leaping along the high wire without a net. Look, Mom! No loci!
Review or Redo
Actually, I did have a net: smart reviews, using spaced repetition.
Simply reciting isn’t enough. At best, you soon forget it. At worst,
you repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat until you actually do
learn it, in the most inefficient and painful way possible. I.e., rote
repetition. Our shared cultural memory of this horror is a big reason
why so many people today are allergic to memory training.
Smart reviews avoid all that. (Okay, most of that. You don’t
always feel like doing your cards.) You recite as few times as
possible to fix the information in your brain.
For poetry, this means that instead of imposing the alien structure of
visual mnemonics, you can focus on the natural oral rhythms and
rhymes. Smart reviews will make them stick (usually).
Of course, spaced repetition is front-loaded. A new stanza needs to be
repeated at least twice a day for the first three to four days,
before you start the flashcard on Anki. Anki won’t do enough initial
repetitions for a poem. After those first days of repetitions, you can
start the card on Anki, and the normal spaced repetition schedule will
take over.
By stanza and by canto
The key choice is how much to put onto a flashcard. After a lot of
experimentation, I decided to review at two levels: by stanza and
by canto. (The different sections don’t have a name, so I called
them cantos.)
As I first learned a new canto, I would review each stanza on its own
card. The prompt would be the last line of the preceding stanza, since
the transition between stanzas is where I’d probably get lost. If the
prompt was the first line of this stanza, I’d have no sense at all
of how the stanzas connected.
One stanza per card kept my repetitions focused. I wouldn’t have to
repeat three or four easy stanzas because of one mistake in a tricky area.
However, once I got through a canto, I would add a card for the
entire canto. (For longer cantos, I would break them into
sections.) I needed to recite each canto together, so I could put each
stanza into context. Otherwise, I’d never know the poem as a whole.
This two-tier system worked pretty well. As a side note, I’m not sure
the stanza is always a large enough unit. For the Ballad of the White
Horse, I’m currently trying 20 lines or so. But so far, that seems a
little long.
Speak clearly
Just as visual mnemonics need to be bright, colorful, and sharp, your
recitation needs to be crisp. Your ears and even your mouth need to
feel the shapes of the words. I remember when a line was giving me
particular trouble, and I realized I needed to stop mumbling and
actually articulate the words. I did, and they snapped into place. It
felt like I’d turned on the light; I could see what I was doing.
Imagine the actual poem
An important reason not to use visual mnemonics constantly is that
you want to be free to imagine what’s actually happening. You can
only imagine one thing at a time. That’s why rhythm and rhyme are such
a brilliant technology.
Visual mnemonics for the rough spots
Still, sometimes the oral isn’t enough. This poem was written to be
read; it didn’t have the built-in mnemonic devices of, say, the
Iliad. Sometimes, the repetitive structure would get me jumbled.
Repetition can be great, but it can also cross your wires as you try
to navigate. For those cases, I used visual mnemonics.
Instead of loci, I would attach the mnemonic to the actual poem. For
instance, here’s a tricky stanza transition.
Then they sang a psalm,
Did those pious Glugs ‘neath the Snufflebust palm.
And every bee that kisses a flow’r,
This whole canto is a series of similar transitions. I kept forgetting
what came after that gloriously Seussian Snufflebust palm.
(Snufflebust. Who knew they had such cool words in 1917?) To connect
the stanzas, I imagined a tufty tree from The Lorax, and put a giant
bee in it. No locus was needed; the ending “Snufflebust palm”
triggered the mnemonic.
Visual mnemonics for navigation (maybe)
This is a good one-off solution for occasional tough spots. However,
it might have been smarter to use a locus for this whole troublesome
canto. I could have used one or two prompts for each stanza (not
each line).
A few other cantos had this same repetitive problem. I’ve (mostly)
ironed out the kinks, thanks to Anki. Would it have been more
efficient to set up loci as soon as I had trouble? Ultimately, it’s a
personal choice. Which is less hassle, to set up an underlying loci
system for navigation, or just repeat the whole canto a few more
times? Your call.
On a side note, I do appreciate having a locus for the table of
contents, to keep the cantos in order.
Success: combining techniques
When I started memorizing this poem, I thought I would need tons of
loci. Ten years earlier, I would have thought I needed tons of
repetition (also that it would be impossible). Instead, the solution
was a combination of techniques. I had to:
- focus on the natural rhythms of the poetry, by clear recitation and imagination
- use Anki to refine (and keep) my recitation, at both the stanza and canto levels
- use visual mnemonics where needed, when the oral asn’t enough
Any one or even two of these techniques would never have worked for
me. So be flexible, and experiment. Every project is unique.
UPDATE: On a later review, I realized I did need to add a few more loci after all. I still didn’t need anything crazy like a mnemonic for every word or line. But a few stanzas (not all of them, or even close) were too easy to mix up. I needed loci to keep my oral memories organized.
