On learning poetry

I'm trying to think now when I first encountered "Resumé"(The original I based mine on). It might have been high school. (But yeah: I can imagine parental outcry today were a 13 year old to be given that. There are too many people who don't understand sarcasm today, I think.) I don't have it in any of the poetry anthologies I own (I own four, but two of them are much more heavily slanted to pre-19th century poetry). The one I thought might have it, didn't - but when I looked more closely, it was an anthology put out by a British hospice group (I think that's right, that's what it was) as a fundraiser, and perhaps such a poem was judged as not appropriate for such a collection...

My teachers did lots with poetry throughout school. I remember doing stuff with it as early as third grade (and likely, there was poetry earlier). I remember learning the different forms - haiku, limerick (though, heh, there were a lot of limericks we were never exposed to in school!), clerihews, something called a diamante (which I don't remember ever seeing used in 'serious' poetry anthologies). A lot of these we learned to write. And we learned about sonnets and villanelles but we were never pushed to write those, I suppose because they were seen as "harder" and perhaps too frustrating for schoolkids. (And there are different forms of sonnets, too: Petrarchan and Shakespearean (and I think there was a Spenserian, too?)

One of my favorite poetry assignments was in fifth grade - throughout the course of a marking period we made what were essentially chapbooks: we were encouraged to find poems we liked and handcopy them out, and then we bound the pages we had copied them on to, and if we wanted to, we could illustrate our chapbooks. Now that I think of it, this was a good assignment from several aspects - it gave us the freedom to indulge our own interests and tastes (I remember that two of the poems I included were Fog by Carl Sandburg and The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. Now that I think of it - I may have chosen them for their length rather than any kind of aesthetic choice). It was also an exercise in penmanship (something I was repeatedly told I needed to work on); we were encouraged to use our neatest hand to write these, and to recopy them if necessary. And for those of us who were kind of overachievers, it gave us the opportunity to go haring off in the poetry anthologies in both the classroom and school libraries. (I *think* we were given some class time to work on it, but also I remember working on it at home, as homework.) And it was an early example (in my schooling at least) of a longer-term project where you had to plan and work on it a little at a time, and start early enough in advance to meet the deadline.

(I think I actually still HAVE my chapbook somewhere; I think it was one of the few things I told my mom I wanted saved in the box of old school papers she put together for me when I went to college).

Later on, in high school, we were made to memorize poetry. I got to do that in both some of my English classes (we also memorized some passages of Shakespeare) and in French class. I can still call up bits and pieces of the poems I memorized nearly 30 years ago now - not all of them (though I am very close to being able to recall all of "The Road Not Taken" and Demain, des L'aube (which is a beautiful poem, and I see it has been set to music)

And I know that that kind of thing - rote memorization - is very much out of fashion in education. But again, for some students, I think it's a good thing. I enjoyed the discipline of learning the poems (I did not so much enjoy having to stand up and recite them; even then I got a bit of stage fright). And I have to admit that as an adult, I love being able to recall them. Sometimes, as entertainment when I'm stuck standing in line somewhere, I will see how much of something I can remember. (And I admit I remember some poems, or at least parts of them, that I was never required to memorize - I could remember most of "Resume" that I cited above. And I know most of "These Winter Sundays" - which is probably my favorite poem ever - off by heart)

I wonder what the reaction would be today to a teacher expecting their students to memorize and be able to recite poetry. I know it was a very common thing not so very long ago. (The high school I attended was, in many ways, pretty old-school; they still did certain things the way they had been done 20 or more years before I got there. As I said: maybe it wouldn't be so great for some students but it was a wonderful experience for me, and not just from the standpoint of learning).

My older relatives could recall lots of poetry. My mom learned some in school; her older sister and her mother had learned even more. I know my aunt could quote big chunks of people like Whittier. (She also learned Latin - even though she stopped attending school at 10th grade, there were still things she knew that I, with my Ph.D., do not)

Actually, memorization may have been somewhat easy for me, the way my brain works. (I don't always remember word-for-word perfectly, though - I have to work at it if I want to do that). But enough repetition gets stuff in my head - I've noticed that most of the familiar hymns at church, I don't need the hymnbook to sing (I notice that in particular the weeks I am elder - going and standing at the back of the church, ready to go up to the table, the Communion hymn is often something I know off by heart and can actually sing as I walk up.)

I wonder how much poetry is still done in schools. Some of my friends with kids, hearing about what their kids are doing in school, makes me feel like I attended school during some kind of vanished Golden Age, where there was time for fun (well, academic fun - but for me, stuff like writing poems to demonstrate certain forms WAS fun). And it also seems like the social milieu has gotten much rougher and meaner. (Or maybe, as Jane and Michael Stern commented in their "Square Meals" - something to the effect of, no matter how dismal it was at the time, childhood looks better and better the farther you get from it. Because, I suppose, the wearing-down quality of adult responsibility and adult frustrations dulls the memory of the pain of things like not being invited to birthday parties, or the frustration of having no authority of your own and having to always do as you were told.) Then again - one of the reasons my parents chose to live in the town that they did (my dad had a longer commute than he might) was the alleged quality of the local school system. So maybe I was just unusually lucky in my education.