(UPDATE - July 14, 2011: Verbatim has been updated and improved. Click here to learn about the update!)

April is National Poetry Month. Now I'm interested in poems, as they can be great to memorize. Once you memorize one, you make it personal to you, and you always have it handy to inspire.

First, take a look back at Grey Matters' poetry posts. This is a great way not only to learn about how to memorize poems, but to find great sources for poetry, as well. I have quite a few poetry-related video playlists on YouTube, including:

• Classic Poetry
• Poetry from UBS ads (as discussed in this blog entry)
• Nipsey Russell's comedic poems
• Some non-classic but interesting poems
• Poems from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (As performed by the cast of the musical CATS)
• Poems from Martin Gardner's Best Remembered Poems

To help memorize the poems on your iPhone or iPod , you can use my Verbatim web app, with help from the Verbatim video tutorials. Verbatim even includes some great related resource links that have some great poetry sources.

However, with Verbatim being a web app, it requires an internet connection to work (3G or WiFi). I am working on turning Verbatim into a native app, it won't be ready for a while. Fortunately, there are two great alternatives.

For the iPhone and iPod Touch, there's iByMemory (iTunes Link), which simulates the first letter and fill-in-the-blank modes of Verbatim without requiring an internet connection (except to upload the piece itself). At this writing, the AppShopper site states that iByMemory has been removed from the App Store, but if you check the links above, you can see that this seems to be a mistake.

If you don't have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can still practice in the same manner with the online site Memorize Now. To learn how to use it, read the FAQ first. This site helps you memorize long passages of text by simply pasting them in, and challenging you to remember them in a first letter/fill-in-the-blank mode, as well as a flashcard approach. It's simple, direct, free and there's no membership, yet you can still save your work from session to session!

Try and memorize at least one poem for National Poetry Month. I think you'll be surprised as to how personal it becomes.