One Hundred Poems and the Brain: A Cyclist's Memoir

By Henry Ryman Miner

About the Book
As Henry Ryman Miner began to grow older, he noticed a subtle increase in forgetfulness, like going to another room and forgetting what he came for. He began to undertake various forms of mental exercise in an effort to improve his memory which led him to engage in the practice of memorizing and reciting favorite and newly discovered poems, a practice that he combined with cycling in the Oakland hills. Gradually his collection of memorized verse grew to reach one hundred poems.
Broken into three parts, Miner first details his process for memorization, explaining in detail his methods and strategies. In part two, he lists all one hundred poems and includes his thoughts on each, reflecting on its place in the chronology of his life. Now familiar with his personal process and poems, Miner, in part three, explains the science behind memory, memorization, and the brain, proving and disproving some of his own methods in part one.
A fascinating read on the realities of memory loss with aging, and the power of poetry, Miner’s One Hundred Poems and the Brain blends science and art into one engaging, thoughtful mental exercise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Dec 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798890278395

Book preview

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The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Henry Ryman Miner

Front and back cover photographs Copyright © Gary Schatan

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

Dorrance Publishing Co

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Visit our website at www.dorrancebookstore.com

ISBN: 979-8-89027-459-5

eISBN: 979-8-89027-839-5

For my Lisa, my muse throughout this project,

in my poetry practice and in life.

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Chapter One:

Now, What the Heck Did I Come in Here For

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I think I started to notice it sometime in my late thirties or early forties the experience that goes something like this: I’m starting to cook dinner and have assembled most of the ingredients when I realize that I need an onion. So, I go out to the pantry (which is in the garage) and along the way I notice that some of the plants in the garden look dry, and I make a mental note to water them. When I get out to the pantry, less than fifteen seconds later, I suddenly have no idea what I am looking for. I open the garage fridge and grab a couple of beers (as long as I’m there) and hope that it will come to me. Moments later, having given up, I turn to go back to where I had had the original thought to refresh my memory when my eye scans the pantry shelf, spying the bag of onions, and Eureka! I remember!

This experience is repeated in many different forms with many different components. The results vary:  Sometimes, as in this case, my memory is triggered when I spy the object of my search (or something related to it). Sometimes it simply comes back to me somehow on its own. Other times, I have to go back to where I started, reengage in what I had been doing, and then it will suddenly come back to me. In some cases, it takes a bit longer for something to trigger the memory. Inevitably, however, I figure it out one way or another.

At first, it was only a bit frustrating. However, as the phenomenon repeated itself, it became annoying and, ultimately, disturbing. But the annoyance of having the memory lapse disrupt the flow of whatever I had been engaged in was not as disturbing as the thought that I might be starting to lose my mind.  I didn’t relish the idea of stumbling along unsure of what I was trying to do for the rest of my life.

Other memory lapses, like recalling people’s names, remembering book or movie titles, misplacing items, etc. seemed to be more noticeable and added to the creeping concern that maybe I was beginning to lose my memory. Strong and reliable recall of not just facts and figures but events, concepts, and ideas has always been valued in the core of who I am, in my very existence, and I could not imagine it not being there, at my core.

At first, I thought it might be some sort of short-term memory malfunction, due to smoking pot, but then I did not see any difference when I was not smoking it or even when I had stopped altogether. I had smoked pot pretty regularly (like, daily) from when I was in my late teens (I am, after all, a child of the hippie era) and had largely left it behind by my late fifties as part of a greater life change. So, I had considerable experience with the short-term memory disruption that THC can bring about, and yet, I did not notice any persisting effect in, for instance, learning new information during or after my pot-smoking days.

Eventually, I discovered that I was not alone in this forgot-what-I-came-for experience as many of my peers reported that they were also experiencing the same phenomenon—potheads and abstainers alike. I gathered that most people who were into or through their forties experienced this sort of apparent memory lapse. Eventually, I considered that it was just another aspect of aging that many of us were experiencing, like fading eyesight, thinning hair, a slowing metabolism and associated weight gain, deteriorating dentition, slow recovery from injuries, etc. Like it or not, I was experiencing the aging process.

Thinking about this phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective, it made sense to me to consider that humans may well peak physically and mentally during their fourth or fifth decade of life. I considered that while there may be countless mechanisms that organisms employ to achieve fitness, fitness of a species is truly achieved when its members consistently and reliably produce offspring that are viable and that in turn are able to produce viable offspring themselves. In other words, once an individual of any species has been able to pass its genes along to children who can in turn produce children, its job is done. So why invest any further in maintaining the older members?¹ Following this logic, then, it seemed to me that this apparent degeneration makes sense. Personally, while I considered that I might well be no longer relevant or valued biologically to the human species, I strongly felt (and feel) that I could still contribute culturally at least. And for that I would need my brain and specifically my memory!

Ultimately, however, this evolutionary perspective, valid or not, is not vitally relevant to my experience. I simply employed it as a light academic rationale to help me somehow feel better about the aging process and to relate to my peers who were undergoing the same changes.

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LUANN © 2020 GEC Inc. Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.

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¹ Keep in mind that these physical adaptations evolved over millions of years and that our cultural adaptations are much more recent and evolve quite differently (e.g., more rapidly) than our biological adaptations.

Chapter Two:

Brain Exercise

As I noticed this memory lapse more, I became attentive to articles, radio programs, etc. discussing brain health and memory in the aging brain. And one perspective that piqued my interest was that of the brain as a structure needing exercise to be maintained in good shape. One recommendation was to avoid doing regular, mundane tasks in a repetitive, rote, unconscious fashion and to vary one’s approach to these kinds of tasks, doing them more consciously. This idea made good sense to me: make the brain think, engage it, make it be active. So, I started to look at various quotidian activities that I engage in, to see how I might be more conscious as I engage in each of them. Certainly, my morning routine provided (and continues to provide) an abundance of examples of consistently repetitious tasks and activities. Showering, shaving, brushing teeth and hair, stretching, dressing, taking vitamins, making tea, preparing and eating breakfast, etc. provide ample opportunity for changing unconscious habitual behavior into conscious and varied brain exercise.

As I actively engaged in these sorts of daily meditation exercises, I looked for other means to give my brain a workout. One way of expanding on the challenge of doing regular activities in different, conscious ways, I found, was to incorporate linguistic components in them. For instance, many activities can or naturally do include counting—like reps in physical exercises. Over the years I’d been exposed to counting in various foreign languages (French, Spanish, German, and Japanese, for example), and so I took to counting in different languages during these activities where counting was or could be involved. Just for fun, I sometimes count backwards as well.

I do not always count; I have found that some days I seem to need to just let my mind wander, and so I forego the counting in favor of just seeing where my brain will take me. This kind of change of pace, I have learned, often leads to discovery or creativity or problem-solving.

Another recommendation I have heard is to find different approaches to traveling to routine destinations. Varying a regular commute to work or route to the store is sometimes difficult to achieve, given busy and structured schedules, traffic patterns, etc. But breaking out of a regularly patterned travel routine is not only stimulating to the brain, it can also lead to surprise and discovery.

I recalled that, years ago, in the time before smartphones, I was working for a CEO who was delighted when, on our way to an important business meeting and rather tight on time, we became seriously lost, causing me great anxiety. I love getting lost! he enthused. I was so completely surprised by this excited statement that I totally relaxed in the moment. That’s when you discover unexpected things, he went on. It’s so exciting! Soon, though, we were back on track, and we luckily made the meeting on time, but I have never forgotten his wonderful sense of excitement at being lost. And in today’s world of smartphone map apps, I worry that we are not only missing opportunities for discovery (and the excitement that goes with it), but we may be dulling our brains in missing out on the exercise of having to think about how to move around in three-dimensional space—especially while in motion, looking up and out at the world around us instead at what is in our hands.

Chapter Three:

The Poetry Practice

The linguistic component of my brain exercises early on took another and, I would find, much more interesting form. Even before I had picked up on the increasing and trendy popularity of puzzles, board games, computer games, and other new and different ways to exercise the brain, I had begun to think back on my educational experiences in the 1950s and 1960s to recall the kinds of activities, exercises, and techniques that teachers employed to enhance learning and especially improve our memories. I remembered, among other things, the occasional requirement to memorize poems, speeches (e.g., the Gettysburg Address), songs, dramatic passages, etc. I recalled that memorization, like grammar and cursive writing, was a traditional aspect of elementary and secondary liberal arts education.

I also remembered that, often at family gatherings and holidays, certain individuals would be known to recite their favorite piece or pieces. This practice, of course, went along with favorite songs. But the recitations seemed to stand out for me somehow. My sister, Clare, from a very young age was fond of reciting Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas, and, as I grew older, she often roped me into reciting it with her in our little family Christmas Eve pageants. She was a taskmaster, demanding I get every word right! We rehearsed for hours, as she endeavored to get me up to speed by getting every word right. Of course, the ultimate performance was always well received and, in the end, worth the effort.

Sometimes when we got together with our family friends, the Ralstons, who had sons the same age as my brother and I and with whom my dad shared Princeton alumni status, amongst the various songs that poured out, a seemingly spontaneous recitation would erupt. As the evening wore on, and Mr. Ralston (Jack) had a few drinks in him, he would lean back, close his eyes, and hold forth with a wonderfully animated rendition of Robert Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee. I think he had a few other such pieces that he would recite (e.g., Service’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew), as well, but that particular piece really captured my imagination. It was dramatic and humorous with wonderfully rhyming descriptions of the frozen Yukon and the quest for gold! And, of course, it ends with a marvelously ironic and surprising conclusion. I was always impressed with Jack Ralston’s presentations as they were not only amusing, but somewhat awe inspiring. He seemed to nail it every time!

One other influence (or inspiration) that I recall was the Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451, which I read as a teenager and then saw as a movie.¹ I remember that at the end, the protagonist escapes from the book-banning and -burning oppressive, autocratic regime to join a colony of fellow resistors, so called booklovers. With the programmatic destruction (burning) of all books, the colonists had each chosen a favorite piece of literature to memorize and thus preserve, and then recite as requested. Each person had essentially become a novel, play, or other work which they carried in their heads/memories wherever they went. I was captivated by the idea of carrying favorite literary pieces in one’s mind as a sort of intellectual and cultural portability. The concept certainly made for an interesting community!

To be sure, poetry was not necessarily one of my favorite areas of study in English classes. While I did enjoy the kinds of rhyming, story poems like those mentioned, I did not really resonate with poetry or the poetic form per se. And I certainly was not particularly adept at generating any verse of my own. Yet, somehow, and I do not remember how or why, I decided to start memorizing poetry as a brain exercise. Perhaps I was trying to maintain or resurrect something from my past or from a broader cultural past. I am not sure what it was, but something (or some things) did spark my interest.

The specifics of how it started and how or why I selected Ernest Thayer’s Casey at the Bat are lost to me, now, but initially, I began to learn the poem with my then-wife, Rainshadow, in the evenings as we were preparing dinner. With the book on the counter, open to Thayer’s classic piece, we would challenge each other to learn each stanza, adding usually one per night, until we both finally knew the whole poem. We’d go line by line and see who could be first to remember all the lines of the stanza we were learning, making sure to get the words exactly right. We’d develop tricks like miming words or phrases to provide hints when one or the other of us got stuck. For example, in the first stanza when Thayer relates that the first two batters (Cooney and Barrows) made outs, I would mime someone dying to jar the memory for, So then when Cooney died at first… Surprisingly, many of the images from those hints have stuck with me for years. These kinds of memory aids became particularly helpful as the number of learned stanzas grew over the course of many evenings, and ultimately, the whole poem was learned.

It was a fun and challenging activity, and I recall that we especially enjoyed Thayer’s use of language. We marveled at his varied terms for the baseball itself, which he refers to as the leather covered sphere and spheroid. We found his formal, dated nineteenth-century language to be amusing and wonderfully descriptive. And this kind of appreciation only further helped in the learning and recalling of the poem.

Once learned, we would sometimes enjoy entertaining ourselves and/or family and friends by reciting it, occasionally with dramatic affect. And then, excited to have mastered one classic, rhyming, dramatic story poem, I decided to learn Sam McGee, and perhaps motivated by the memories of having heard it in my youth, I took it on as my own. As with the Thayer piece, the language captivated me, although Service’s verbiage is less formal (if not a bit more modern) and decidedly more playful. Again, this appreciation for the language helped in the learning process. Also, Service’s playfulness in word choice, rhymes, etc. made it a fun and entertaining piece to share as it had for Jack Ralston on social occasions, family outings, etc. I found the challenge of remembering and reciting it (as with Casey at the Bat) to be exciting and, ultimately, gratifying.

Rain and I continued to share the interest in learning poems, still memorizing some pieces together, especially enjoying a couple of intriguing children’s verses, Bliss Carman’s Mr. Moon and Eugene Field’s Wynken, Blynkin and Nod that we came across in children’s literature. At some point, the learning and reciting practice expanded as Rain and others of our friends also began learning pieces on their own. These we would share in recitations on poetry nights. This development led to some wonderful evenings that would occur periodically over the course of several years. It was much fun and, I think, really helped to encourage us all to engage in a memorization practice to one degree