Mike Chasar of Poetry Magazine writes about the lost art of poetry memorization. While it’s true that the academic demand to memorize poetry has all but disappeared from the American school system, I’m happy to report that this dying art remains alive and well in tiny corners of the world, including several of my own.
I took a poetry class in college with the late great poet and professor Hugh Ogden, and he required us to have a newly memorized poem “of substance” ready for each class.
“Of substance” meant it had better not be four lines long.
We sat around a large wooden table and recited our poems as our classmates listened. Remarkably, Hugh also had many poems that we recited committed to memory. He would close his eyes as we recited, almost as if he were listening to music and not the fumbling, occasionally inarticulate words of a nervous, undergraduate English major.
It was a challenging but incredibly rewarding expectation. I still have about half a dozen of those poems committed to memory, including Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” which I fell in love with through the process of memorization and still love today.
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Later, when I had students of my own –third graders and then fifth graders – I would require them to memorize at least one poem “of substance” each year. My students would grumble and complain about the requirement, but once they memorized and performed the poem on stage, they were happy to have done so.
Today, my students perform Shakespeare, memorizing dozens and sometimes hundreds of lines with nary a complaint. And we still memorize our one poem of the year, myself included, in honor of Hugh.
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Years ago, when Elysha and I still exchanged a present for every night of Hanukkah, I memorized Elysha’s favorite poem, William Blake’s “The Tyger,” and presented it as one of my gifts to her. With the poem committed to memory, I told Elysha that she had access to it at any time as long as we were together, and I would always recite it to her on demand.
She loved the gift, or at least pretended to love it. And I can still recite the poem today, as can she.
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But my favorite moment of poetry memorization occurred about ten years ago when the teacher in the adjoining classroom began using the following call-and-response with his students:
Teacher: Oh Captain!
Students: My Captain!
I asked the teacher if he knew the Whitman poem that he was using – which I had memorized in college for Hugh and still have committed to memory to this day – and he did not. He had taken the idea from Dead Poet’s Society, Robin Williams’s film about an English teacher at a boy’s boarding school in the 1960s.
I thought this unfortunate, so the next time he was absent from his classroom, I handed a copy of the poem to each of his students and asked them to begin memorizing it secretly. I explained that I would pop into their classroom whenever he was out to help them memorize the poem and rehearse. One day, when they all knew the poem by heart, they would leap to their feet amid the call and response, and instead of simply saying, “My Captain!” they would recite the entire poem to him.
It finally happened on a morning in April. Since our classroom had an adjoining door and window, I could wait and listen for him to shout his first “Oh, Captain!” of the day. Then, I watched as they all stood and recited the poem back to him. Shouted it back to him.
In my memory, their recitation was universal and flawless. I suspect the truth was something not quite so cinematic. Still, it was amazing.
Had I been more familiar with the film then, I would’ve had them all stand on their desks. That would’ve been cinematic.
