MEMORISE THIS BLOG POST

I had a feeling it was National Poetry Month. The unusual amount of poetry programmes on public radio must've tipped me off. Of course there is always some hand-wringing over the necessity of a federally sponsored marketing drive for poetry. I for one come am against it. We would be living in a dangerous country if a love of poetry could be properly mandated from the top.

Dick Allen's "The Litany of Disparagement" is the poem I turn to most often. I memorised Part II so that I could have access to it at all times. (Allen's poem rhymes, conveniently)

...Pray, for the willows must shake.
Ripples must die in the lake.
I am the life I forsake...

I don't go around reciting it, but I do visit it occasionally, usually not in the best of times.

A progressive liberal-arts education has long discarded rote memorisation of poetry, literature, facts and dates. The idea is that by removing these seemingly unnecessary hurdles, students are more free to probe their coursework for themes and meaning. But it also means that we are more careless with the solid furniture of fact and language. My Harvard-educated graduate-school professor managed to forget the year the second world war ended. He casually shrugged off this blunder by explaining that he is a cultural historian.

Just as a touch of memorisation might improve our understanding of history (some of those dates and names are turn out to be meaningful), it could also enhance our reading of poetry. The moment you make a poem a part of you, it gains new power.

Jim Holt recently extolled the virtues of memorising and reciting poetry in the New York Times. He noted that it must be a personal endeavour (“It’s all about pleasure”):

...something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem—the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say—and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one.

Holt suggests beginning with "Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud", edited by Robert Pinsky, a former poet laureate, complete with a CD of poems being read aloud.

Of course a poem needn't be memorised in order to charm, befuddle or devastate. Some poems leave a lasting impression after only a brief encounter. During National Poetry Month, I suppose it would do no harm to read a bit more poetry. Regardless, I'm glad to have "The Litany of Disparagement" any time I need it.

~ Bradley Freedman

Picture Credit: MousyBoyWithGlasses (via Flickr)