Andrew, thanks for posing one of my favorite questions. In Renault's The Praise Singer his students address Simonides as Master of Memory, a title to which I aspire. At my first tutorial Warren assigned me the first 109 lines of Paradise Lost. Then he gave me a week to finish Book I. "But that's 900 lines!" I protested. "Boy, meter and rhyme are powerful mnemonic devices, and I'm training your memory. You need to have all the great poetry of the cannon ringing in your head. Then you'll automatically avoid mistakes in rhyme, rhythm or lineation." I went on to memorize about 30,000 lines for him. Unfortunately a third of that was Yeats, and I was thirty before I overcame that overwhelming influence, so there are pitfalls in memorization. And I remember my disgust at being forced to learn The Daffodils at age 11. My teacher should have assigned me the Intimations Ode, the Morte d'Arthur or the Eve of St. Agnes, which I would later have for the sheer love of them.
I perform only from memory, taking just an index card of titles to the podium. And I don't mean a coupla pomes at an open mike, but varied hour-long programs for a lengthy reading tour. It allows me matchless eye contact with my audience, which allows me to switch gears when I'm losing them. And they come away thinking that I at least think my speech is memorable. I once read with Kate Light, and afterwards I heard a little girl ask her mamma, "Why does that lady read from a book?" To me the notion of a poet reading from text is as foreign as that of Hamlet using a script or a great soloist using a score.
Wilbur always assigned his students Lycidas and says, "Those who complained the loudest had memorized the starting lineups of every team in the NFL." When he introduced my reading at the Frost Cottage in Key West he said "Murphy is the first poet to 'say' his poems in this garden since Robert last read here." I tried not to slip in my puddle as I approached that podium.
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