a little skip for your step

There are a few things I've been wanting to start for a while. I'd like to memorize a poem a day. Well, at least a stanza a day. I came across this article while hopping around poetry blogs, and it resonated with me. There's something so enchanting about the repetition, recitation, and rhythm involved. The poems become yours to shuffle through in your head - roll around your tongue, swish between your cheeks. A channel to the poet across time, space, distance. Like reading aloud, intimacy abounds.

I'd also really like to learn to identify birds, flowers, and trees (all plants for that matter, I suppose). Maybe it's the same sort of inclination. A desire to hold those names and images, delicate scents and feel, in my head, internalized, make them mine without having them physically in my hands.

For the past I don't know how many years, I've had an increasing problem with spoken and written language. Sophomore year of college I learned the vocabulary of semiotics, and reading and discussing Saussure and Irigaray, among others, helped me vocalize that plaguing intangible distrust for the confines of language.

While I'm consistently preoccupied with language's inefficacy and frustrated that natural feelings, meaning, and interaction are trapped by arbitrary words, I can't help but love these classification systems.

I can't explain it, but there's something inexplicably romantic to me about these names. Maybe it's uniting the natural world in my daily discourse. Integrating language, man-made and enforced, with the mysterious and beautiful. Maybe words can't rationalize it.

(here)