The poem I memorized by accident, one line a week

I never sat down to memorize this poem. I just read it slowly enough, and often enough over a few months, that one day I noticed I could recite the whole thing without looking. It happened the way learning a friend's voice happens — not a task, just repeated exposure that quietly became knowledge.

I think that's closer to how memorization is supposed to work with poetry than the flashcard version most of us were taught in school. Force-memorizing a poem for a test produces a poem you can recite and don't actually know. Reading one slowly, repeatedly, for pleasure, produces the opposite — a poem you know by heart before you ever tried to.

Related reading: The Guide to Reading and Writing Poetry Without the Intimidation.