To each his own. I've always made my students
memorize a hundred or so lines a semester (which
seems a huge amount to them), just as I had to
memorize a great deal of verse in elementary and
highschool---for which I'm still grateful. A few
students always say they were glad to be made to
get some poems by heart, that they understood them
in new ways by having them there. Since highschool
I have almost never sat down and memorized a poem,
though I must know many hundreds. As Frost said,
"I long ago decided that if it didn't stick to me,
I wouldn't stick to it." I just find that if I've
fallen in love with a poem and read it a few times
(or a few hundred times), I usually find I know it.
I've been to a number of readings where the poet
said all of his poems by heart (Jim Wright and Tim
Murphy come immediately to mind, both very good
readers) and to many more where the poet read from
a book or sheaf of mss. Some of each kind were
excellent, a lot of each kind were godawful. Most
poets I know have lots of bits and pieces and passages
in their memory but not many whole poems. Others,
like Wright and Heaney (and no doubt Murphy & Sullivan)
could recite all night long. I like to read from
my book at readings because it helps me to recall
and re-enter the emotions the poem was written out
of, but I can often raise my eyes and look at people
in the audience for a quatrain or two. Oddly enough,
although I know a great many poems by heart, very
few of them are mine. As one of the poets said, it's
partly because I'm constantly tinkering with many of
them, even after they're in a book. It's certainly
not out of modesty, just an odd quirk. (And I might
add, I know only a half dozen poems in free verse
and those tend to be short. Once Don Justice and I
tried to piece together Williams' wonderful "To Elsie"
from our joint memories and we finally did get it all,
but it took a while.)
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