[John Beaton]

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

[Gail White]

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

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[David Mason]

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...

[Tim Murphy]

"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.

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Charlotte Innes]

Originally Posted by Maryann Corbett

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.

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....

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Sharon Fish Mooney]

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

[John Beaton]

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:

The poem, also known as O'Driscoll, was written by William Butler Yeats at the turn of the century, and is considered one of the greatest and most musical, of his works, a set of eleven quatrains.

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