Memorize, memorize, memorize!!!
 

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Hi Don,

I like students to memorize poems but fifty lines is quite a task, and could be off-putting and counter-productive. A poem that's not too daunting to learn, perhaps 'The Road Not Taken' or something similar, is a good place to start.
Isn't it preferable to be able to recite several poems, than fifty lines of a long poem such as 'In Praise of Limestone'?
I memorized Leigh Hunt's 'Abou Ben Adhem and the Angel' for homework when I was twelve, and can still recite it - and still love it!

Teachers have a huge responsibility and many of them have turned children off poetry for life, which is totally unforgiveable and to be avoided at all costs. The age of the students is a major consideration when choosing the style, and length, of a poem for them to learn; 'Less is More' is worth bearing in mind IMO (though giving them the choice would probably result in just a limerick!).

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In case anyone is unfamiliar with the story:

Late in life, Pablo Neruda was giving a performance in a huge soccer stadium, packed with fans. Members of the audience shouted out a request for a poem from his earliest days. Neruda apologized, explaining that his memory was fading and that it had been such a long time since he had performed that particular piece. Not a problem. The crowd, in unison, rose up and recited it to him!

Obviously, in cultures that support professional poets the idea of reading from a book is just as unthinkable as stage or movie actors reading from scripts. In this case, cause and effect are one; speaking both generally and crossculturally, performances fill concert halls and stadiums, readings fill telephone booths.

-o-

My kids do a minimum of 100 lines per class. It ain't hard at all. They can recite them in increments, and sometimes I have them re-recite them at the end of it all so the lines will be lodged in their heads.

When I teach Romantic poets I begin the oral exam by asking each student to recite and explicate at least 25 lines from memory.

I can recite bloody great wodges of Shakespeare. We did indeed have to memorise some of the speeches. And how many Brits of my age can recite 'Slowly, silently, now the moon... Oh, and I can do quite a bit of Tam o'Shanter. It's all those Burns Suppers.

Tennyson is a good guy to memorise. Kipling - lots of bits of Kipling

Bits of Wendy Cope are memorable. Jesus, of his goodness and his grace, Jesus found me a parking space. On the other hand I can't remember much Ted Hughes and as the years go by I hope I shall achieve total forgetfulness.

I can remember fair bits of Sam Gwynn. It's one of the reasons he's my favourite American poet living.

I had three experiences of having to recite poetry back in olden times.

In high school, my teacher asked us to memorize and recite, to her alone, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...". I did it, and felt stupid, but some of it stuck with me (except I found later that I had remembered the second line as "Creeps past this petty pace from day to day..."). I guess it seemed so strange at the time I didn't expect it to make sense.

The second time, taking an Intro. to Poetry class in college, we were asked to stand before the class and recite a small number of lines. I remember two recitations besides my own: one was a hammy theater student who recited part of "The Witch of Coos", playing mother and son in different voices, and nailed it. The second was an otherwise confident and perfectly intelligent student athlete who was visibly nervous and humiliated by the experience. With this method, there is a real danger of turning students off to poetry for good. To some students, it can seem cruel.

The third time, in grad. school, a professor asked us to recite poetry, but allowed us to type it into his computer, if we so chose. We could also recite it to him, or to the class. What's wrong with this method? People, including students, love poetry in different ways. Some of us don't agree that a poem doesn't really live until it's spoken aloud. If that's the case, I've missed out on many of the poems I love the most.

I had a professor who did this. I didn't even really have to do anything, since you could use any poem and at that time I had Prufrock constantly ringing in my ears. Heck, I can think of a few times in college when I was bored during class and tried seeing how much of "To His Coy Mistress" I could transcribe from memory, which was actually nearly all of it (though that was a few years ago, i.e. I'm a bit rusty). The only English poem I ever intentionally memorized was "The Raven" for my 6th grade public speaking project (I also had to memorize LaFontaine's "The Fox and the Crow" in French, but I know I forget big chunks of it when I was reciting it in class, so that's more of a failed attempt than an actual memorization). Otherwise, I just have a lot of them I've read so many times I couldn't help but know them by heart.

Hmmm...

In theory, I think it's a great idea. In practice though, I have a feeling it may have the same effect in some that Jayne describes. First of all, some people (I daresay most people) will never have an interest in poetry, no matter how you try to sell it to them. It's probably the most cerebral of the arts, and there's really not a lot of escapist value in poetry like there often is in other arts.

For those who could derive value from poetry, rote memorization doesn't strike me as a positive route for a number of reasons. I don't believe that knowing a poem by heart makes one a better poet, or even a better appreciator of poetry. Some people just aren't good at memorizing things. I'm one of them. My wife can prattle off lyrics or lines of songs / movies / plays after hearing them once or twice. There are scant few songs I know all the lyrics of (and I'm big into music), relatively few movie lines I can quote (and I've seen countless movies), and when it comes to poetry...well, I think I have ONE of my own poems perfectly memorized, and a small handful of others that I can partially recite. Does that mean I have less of an understanding or appreciation of those poems? No, I don't think so. It just means that my mind isn't good at memorization. I'm very bad at repeating things back verbatim, but I can always convey the gist.

Ultimately, I agree with Jim's assessment that it can be downright cruel to force kids to memorize a poem to read aloud. Honestly, if someone is going to have an interest in poetry, the best way to nurture that interest is by getting that person to think about tropes and how the meanings are packed into the form...and how the form and meaning support each other. Memorization can be a helpful tool (for some) to bring this end forward, but it should never be imposed.

If you create a good social atmosphere in class, most kids have no trouble with it at all. In extreme cases you can let the kid recite in your office. But one key is this: you let the student choose (within some limits) what he or she would like to memorize. He or she should own the poem(s) and not feel obligated to love only what the professor loves.

I can't stand Will's When Icicles Hang by the Wall, which I can still recite, because I was forced to learn it at school. It was probably Greasy Joan that killed it for me, and I resent the space the poem occupies in my brain - I need that space for other stuff, dammit! :rolleyes:

I memorized at least 30,000 lines, and it's easy when your brain is a sponge. Much more difficult now. It did me a world of good.

30,000 lines! Wow! That's positively Roman. How many lines would an entire Shkespeare play be? I don't know how much of the Holy Koran little muslims have to learn. But that's not poetry, is it? I speak from ignorance. It is in verses after all. Isn't it?

I'm on Maui just now and, with my wife, was recently a guest on "Celtic music with Hamish" on the local Mana'o Radio station.

Hamish Burgess, bagpiper, Celtic artist, and host of the show, has an appreciation for poetry and was a friend of the late Liam Clancy. He told me that Liam was a great one for entertaining people with poetry recited from memory, and he sent me this link to a recorded Clancy recitation of a poem written by Padraic Fallon.

I think memorization helps a poet convey a poem emotionally, and that this recitation is a good example of that. I can't see Clancy standing up in a roomful of people, picking up a book, and reading like this.

John

Edna Millay claimed that she memorized Keats' "Eve of Saint Agnes" and "Lamia", so anything is possible.

There's memorization, and there's effective oral delivery, and there's the undeniable usefulness of the first for the second. (Tom Clancy's delivery of "O'Driscoll" ("The Hosts of the Air") is the canonical performance as far as I'm concerned, and I have an old LP of him doing it live in concert.) But this thread is about memorization, not delivery.

Having poems by heart means that you have access to at least some poems always, no matter what the circumstances. It makes it easier to call up examples to demonstrate points in teaching or critique. It provides comfort, or food for thought, when you need it. Since nearly all of what I have by heart is metrical it's of a piece with the music I have by heart, a part of the ongoing rhythm of living. I wish I found it easier to commit free verse to memory, because I'd be richer for it.

So I'd say the best reason to memorize is our own private pleasure. It seems to me that teachers could encourage memorization without mixing it up with recitation, since there are some students who are defeated by even private recitation in the teacher's office.

Oral delivery of poems is important too--it's the best developer of the ear that really teaches meter--but I think we err if we mix it up with memorization. The two are different sources of wealth.

I've been doing this for 20-odd years, and no student has ever been "defeated" by it in any way. The recitation part is simply practice, and with the right classroom atmosphere you can say, "Do it again, and this time speak it to so-and-so across the room." You can turn the classroom into a rehearsal space where everyone shares in performance and is applauded for the effort. Recitation and performance are a way of planting the poem more firmly in memory and also a way of coming to understand it anew.
I firmly believe that oral performance is good training for written performance, and we're not talking about being an "actor." We're just talking about saying the poem like a person talking to other people, getting it across...

"It provides comfort, or food for thought, when you need it. Since nearly all of what I have by heart is metrical it's of a piece with the music I have by heart, a part of the ongoing rhythm of living."

If I go to hell, I shall not lack for great poetry! I might even get a pass into Heaven and sing in the choir.

Wilbur always made his students memorize Lycidas, and I think that's about 150 lines, the memorization made more difficult because it is heterometrical. He says: "The boys who complained loudest were those who had memorized the entire starting line-ups of every team in the National Football League." It is astonishing what teenagers can do in terms of memorization, and I reiterate, it is very much harder as you age. In my own case, the thousands of lines of Murphy I've memorized crowd out my Keats, my Yeats (Yes, I had Eve of St. Agnes memorized, who didn't?) I vehemently urge that students be "forced" to memorize, and flunk them if they don't. Let them exercise their vacant little brains. I've got a young rock star who is my friend and student, and I'll bet he has 30,000 lines of song lyrics in his pretty head. For those who missed it, Paul Stevens published this recollection of a performance by Aaron the Pooch, who studied with Mason, Sullivan and me:

Aaron Poochigian

“Today, professor, I have prepared the odes.”
Here is a youth who eyes the gods’ abodes
longingly, Helicon and Parnassus,
who studies Latin from the times of Crassus.
His adolescent pimples disappear,
his stutter too. Without a trace of fear
he belts out Kubla Khan and Dover Beach,
all the Romantic odes I’d planned to teach.
A thousand lines, I hear out every tale,
Odes to the West Wind and the Nightingale,
to Evening, Intimations, a Grecian urn.
He’s brought no book, only his heart to burn.
And there I stand thirty-five years ago
saying those lines to Warren in the snow.

Aaron did it in a week. Now he's thirty-five with a published book and two forthcoming to his credit. Memorize.

David and Tim, I respect your experience but I wonder if I have in mind a different type and level of student than the ones you're teaching and envisioning. The question at the top of the thread mentions students, but it doesn't specify what kind.

In an elective university-level course, chosen by students who know what they're getting into, the sort of student who is phobic about public speaking isn't likely to be in the class. The students who choose the course will probably get all the benefits both of you describe.

In a required introductory survey course at a high school or community college, I think there's a lot more room for the sort of bad experience that adults have occasionally told me about: a required recitation that left an enduring bad taste in the reluctant student's mouth. Perhaps it's rare, but the stories have stuck with me.

I guess I'm less worried about teaching new poets than I am about creating and developing an audience for poetry, and I guess that's why I'm affected by stories of the ways people have been alienated from poetry. It's good to hear that recitation-from-memory has positive results for the most part.

Lovely. Worth listening to again and again. Thanks for the link.

I was looking at this thread again and, in particular, at Maryann's post #16, which refers to Tom Clancy's recitation of "The Host of the Air" by Yeats.

YouTube now has a recording of this Carnegie Hall performance. (It starts at the 2-minute mark.)

I was comparing it to the text of the poem, which you can find, with interpretive notes, here. Other similar sites have the same text of the poem. The result was quite a surprise.

Not only does Clancy change several lines, he omits stanza 7 completely. (Actually, he starts with S7L3, moves to S8L2, and continues from there on.) Stanza 7 refers to the title theme of the poem and seems to contain its central revelation. The notes explain it further.

Could this have been deliberate? Or might it be that Clancy went in front of a capacity Carnegie Hall audience ill-prepared and got it quite wrong?

The sleeve notes to the recording say:
This doesn't read like a description of a non-standard "version". And Clancy recited only ten quatrains.

Memorized delivery has its risks. And I suppose this is a good example of how poems in the oral tradition can change over time.

John

Thank you , John. You can bet I will be listening to Liam's Fallon poem many times.

I've discovered that showing the students that I myself know by heart many of the poems I teach is in itself an effective teaching tool. Obviously there's an element of showing off in this (well, teaching is also performing, let's admit it), but mainly it works to show the students that I have consided it worth my while to devote a good amount of my time to these poems and that works - with the better students at least - as an incitement.

I hear you, Maryann. I teach high school students--many of them currently not native speakers. In the past, when I taught mainly white, affluent, well-educated students, I tried several times to have them memorize a poem, but it was never very successful. Maybe that was my fault! I think you do have learn poems on a regular basis and enjoy them for it to work.

I barely remember the poems I had to recite at school--except for "Adlestrop," which I still love. But the one thing that stays with me from my days in high school (grammar school in England) is performing in Shakespeare plays. I could roll out huge chunks of blank verse, no problem--and I found it enormously pleasurable. But then I was doing it every day for a couple of months at least.

I just started teaching Othello to 9th graders and had them reading aloud immediately--taking turns in front of the class. They didn’t really understand the text very well, but they really enjoyed performing. And some of them had an ear for the lines instantly--even when they didn’t understand them! Also I once had a 12th grade class who wanted to read the WHOLE of Hamlet aloud, they enjoyed it so much. It had to do with the themes of the play, of course, but also the sound of the words in their own mouths. It's all been very instructive.

Charlotte

PS: Gregory, we cross-posted. How wonderful! Wish I could do that, but my memory seems to be shot....

A pleasant surprise to see this thread going again. Thanks, John, for the information about the incompleteness of Clancy's recitation of Yeats. Alas! My mind is so satisfied with that aural memory that I hate to think of the performance as flawed, but I guess in terms of the poet's intention it is.

Charlotte, thanks for the corroboration, and also for the counterexamples, the students who loved recitation.

I have to say that after coming back to poetry as a grown-up I've made fewer, rather than more, attempts to memorize other people's poems, though some poems or lines stick whether I will or no. The only one of my own that I have absolutely cold is one that I've recorded on a CD and that plays in our little player beside the bed as the wake-up alarm every blessed morning. The rolling dac-hex is a definite help.

I think Tom Clancy's personal version of 'The Host of the Air' is a rare tribute to Yeats' craftsmanship.

A popular turn in Welsh Twmpathau (Ceilidh / Fok Evenings) is the traditional ballad 'William Price' about the eccentric Welsh New Age Prophet whose antics largely led to the decriminalisation of cremation as a means of disposing of the dead:

http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiDRP...tWHENIYNG.html

There are multiple versions of the words; sometimes you can even identify the area where the song was collected by the form the lyric takes.

I remember the original publication of this traditional ballad (in a small press magazine). Quite a few years later, I got to know its author fairly well - and heard the sem-legendary story of how you write a folksong.

As soon as he realised that William Price was being reported as a traditional folksong, the author carefully removed as many traces that linked him to it as he was able. He has published a Collected Poems - there is no trace of "William Price" in it.

You would need to be at least my age to be aware of the real backstory to the words (it would help to be quite a bit older); so in a generation or so, 'William Price' will have become a true folksong.

Just saw this thread--and remembering in high school eons ago the English teacher who had some of us form a voice choir -- and memorize and recite poetry together and present at assemblies...a good technique I think for teachers... I can still recite a number of them at least in part but don't remember any memorized solo

The kids quit complaining about having to memorize a sonnet when they see me get up and speak for fifty minutes from memory. Jonno, what an unspeakably great poem by Padraic Fallon! And how sad it is that Liam Clancy is no longer with the living. It was great to grow up with him.

We grow up with our teachers. I have had many. Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, RS Gwynn, Rhina Espaillat. But I think the finest teacher I have ever had is my junior, Dave Mason. He just strides into a class and knocks the kids out. It must be seen to be believed.

I'm still smiling at Christopher's post. The good Dr. Price was, however, following in the tradition of one of our Southwalian saints, Gwynllw Farfog (Woolos the Beardy) who bathed nude in the Usk with his good lady Gwladys and walked home hand in hand with her in a state of nature. Allegedly.

Does anyone else have strong views on my own bugbear - the person who attends a poetry reading with the published volume in hand and follows the text with a finger?

Ann's bugbear
 

Ann,

I've only ever done it once, but the circumstances were exceptional. Do you remember Steve Bucknell's long-running, wonderful thread about R P Lister? Here it is

I went to the recitation - not a reading - of this amazing gentleman's poems (he's nearly 100 and he was there). The actor Donald Pelmear, who recited the poems from The Idle Demon, was marvellous; he remembered almost every poem in it, word for word.

I simply had to follow him with the book in my hands, I was so astounded. (But it's what actors do; how in the world does anyone learn every word of a Shakespeare play?) I know I couldn't. Just as well that I never aspired to become an actress!

Jayne

It's not so difficult, Jayne. When I was eighteen I played Iago, which was 700 lines to learn, even in our cut version. It was a bloody sight easier than learning all those Chemistry thingies, because what iago says is interesting and chemistry is terminally boring. Thank God there are geeks who will do it for us.

Oddly enough, after damn near fifty years I can remember Othello's speeches better.

I have my kids (9th and 10th graders) memorize a sonnet's length every two weeks. Here we are in April and we started in August, so about 240 lines for the year so far. That's including Chaucer's "Your eyen two wol sley me sodeinly" and Donne's "Go and catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root..."

One point: I let them do the poems in accents. British, German, French,
Unidentifiable. I do them, too. Stereotypes: dumb jock, pampered mamma's boy. I speed them up and slow them down. We say them in unison as if marching off to war. Drunk. Dying. The Russian formalists would have given what I do some name like foregrounding or impounding or rebounding. Occasionally, I find someone who wants to do it straight up, no chaser.

God bless Lance Levins.

Tim, haven't you always sworn that Warren made you memorize the first book of "Paradise Lost"?

Edna Millay claimed to have memorized Keats' "Lamia" & "Eve of Saint Agnes".

(I'm still working on Macbeth's speech that begins "Now o'er the one half world Nature seems dead...")

Can I be in your class please, Mr Levens, sir? :)

Jayne

You're all invited, St. John's Episcopal Church, Cranmer Hall, Savannah GA, every Tues and Thurs, 10-11:30. Just listen for "The Ancient Mariner" sounding arr--gh!, suspiciously like Long John Silver.

Just heard the link of "O'Driscoll." Terrific! Thanks, John.

Yes, Gail. Mr Warren had me memorize 90 lines of Milton the first week, then the rest of the first book, the second week, then five more books in the succeeding weeks. Then he switched me to Chaucer and Shakespeare. What a teacher!

Tim,

'Mr Warren had me memorize...' is such a very telling expression. Compliance is required to 'have' anyone 'do' something, and I think it's truly marvellous that Mr Warren had those expectations of you, and you complied with them!

(My husband would 'have me' wash my car, and not load it up with crap, but he's got no chance!)

Jayne

Jayne, drive your car across the pond, then half way across the continent, and I'll wash it. Red Warren was a great teacher.