“In Homer, the sea is always wine dark the dawn, rosy fingered. Scheherazade uses the same ideas to stick in your head. Oral traditions survived intact for centuries. Siken’s use of imagery - the same imagery used by memory champions and epic ballads throughout history - is what makes him a master of his craft.
Luckily, I don’t think understanding the poem is important. I am not a poetry critic, and would be out of my depth if I tried to analyze the meter or school of poetry that Scheherazade hails from. It’s the first poem in Crush, a collection that won the prestigious 2004 Yale Younger Poets prize at the recommendation of poet laureate Louise Glück. Richard Siken’s poem Scheherazade is one of my favorites, and one of only a few I have memorized. The images produced are so compelling that they grab your brain even if you don’t understand them. Modern writing, and poetry like Scheherazade, uses imagery to imply meaning. In famous examples like Homer, you can observe imagery at work in preservation. Oral traditions relied on complete stories remaining intact over hundreds of years.
Memorizers like Foer admit to having average memories – until they use image-based mnemonic devices to root ideas in their heads And the influential role of imagery on the human brain appears all over the place. Today’s memorizers use the same principles outlined in ad Herennium.
in ancient Rome, the text Rhetorica ad Herennium advises orators to “set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory,” by “establishing likenesses as striking as possible.”
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