(It is also apparently sexual-assault awareness week, at least on college campuses. Here, they had a march and also an outdoor display of "what were you wearing" - because often a blame-the-victim technique is to comment that one's skirt was too short, or top too skimpy, or whatever. And while I do, personally, dress modestly (and in some cases, dress *differently* if I might wind up in a situation where I'd have to run or fight back), also, no one deserves to be attacked for how they've chosen to dress. And a number of the "what were you wearing" things were basically jeans and t-shirts: in other words, typical college kid wear, nothing "revealing")
But yes. National Poetry Month. I grew up with poetry; we had some kid-appropriate books of it and of course Dr. Seuss is really actually poetry. And nursery rhymes. And my maternal grandmother knew a lot of poetry; in her day it was common and expected that schoolkids memorized it, and even in her 80s, sight failed to the point where she could no longer read, she could still call up "Evangeline" or similar. And that impressed me, as a young teen, and made me realize the value of memorizing poetry: even if your sight is taken from you, heck, even if your books are taken from you, you still have it.
One of my favorite school assignments ever was in fifth grade English: we were all assigned to make what amounted to chapbooks: pick out our favorite poems (and add in a few we wrote ourselves), write them out in our best handwriting (yes, I suppose it was also a penmanship exercise), and, if we wished, illustrate them.
I don't remember all the poems I picked (and the ones I wrote are probably better forgotten) but I do remember putting in William Carlos William's "The Red Wheelbarrow" and also Carl Sandburg's "The Fog" ("The Fog comes on little cat feet...")
It's so simple, but I still love the imagery:
The Fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
It's also entirely possible a lot of my selections - given that it was also a penmanship exercise - were ones selected for their brevity.
But also, a lot of the poems I chose were ones that were fun or sweet or whimsical; that's the kind of kid I was.
I admit these days I think more of two other, darker poems: the opening of Eliot's "The Waste Land":
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
And yes, yes, I've read that it probably more applied to Eliot's own depression - often it does seem depression worsens in the spring - but I have been known to murmur "April is the cruellest month" whenever some horror crosses the newswire (and there have been many, these recent Aprils) during this month.
(And I just realized: I have quite a habit of murmuring snatches of poetry - I once quoted a bit of The Naming of Parts at a student who had just broken (accidentally, but still: he was being quite careless) a bunch of glassware during our bad budget times (specifically, the "which we have not got" lines).
And now that I think of it: Doesn't Albert Campion do similar in some of the books about him? I wonder if I developed that affectation from him. (I have always somewhat liked Campion's "upper-middle-class twit" overeducated act)
And (like many people who are familiar with it, I suspect), I have referenced Yeats' The Second Coming many times....well, many times since at least September of 2001.
And I don't know. While I loved the gentle imagery of fog being like a wandering cat as a child, or enjoyed a lot of the nonsense verse of either Lear or Nash....as an adult I find the more serious or darker poems resonate. Part of it is a reminder that "if the world seems bad now, well, it's always seemed bad and people were writing 100 or more years ago about how things seemed bleak" and also it does give me words - more eloquent than the flailing I can usually come up with - to deal with a situation.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I still like some of the gentler work of Robert Frost (we memorized The Road Not Taken when I was in high school) and I also like Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.
We read a lot of poetry in high school; did units on it. And I remember junior year, the very stressful essay exam we all had to take - which would decide our senior-year placement: AP English, or Honors, or merely "regular" English. It was based on the poem The Heavy Bear who Goes with Me and while we were given the poem in advance, we were not given the topic (I don't remember the topic, now) and we spent a couple of days picking apart the poem and arguing it. (I remember one of my friends trying to argue that the "bulging his pants" line meant that the bear had lost control of his bowels; I figured it was merely that he was too fat and ill-shaped to wear human pants)
(I assumed the meaning of the poem was something about our inescapable "animal" nature; that even though we may be educated and try to ascend to more spiritual things, there is still that hunger, that honey-addiction, that primal fear that surfaces during sleep, that pulls us back into the mire. I think I was not too far off; at any rate, I wound up in AP English, aka English V)
I also remember having to memorize The Self and the Mulberry, I think in Freshman English. I still don't "get" that one quite as much. (I do not find mulberries such noble trees; for one thing, their berries stain)
We also memorized poetry in French; I've referred before to Hugo's Demain, des L'Aube.
I do think memorizing poetry has value. I suspect a lot of schools no longer do it, either because it's not something that can be standardizedly tested or because someone has convinced people that it's boring and unprofitable (I was never a material penny richer for being able to stand up and declaim "My Mistress' Eyes," or parts of Prufrock, but emotionally and spiritually I am richer for it). I will say that may be changing, or at least some schools are reviving the old ways: my niece is learning poetry in the homeschool-cooperative classes she is taking (she is six).
(And I don't know. I think a lot about education. In recent years it has become much more - for lack of a better word, reductionistic or mechanistic. Stuff you can easily measure with standardized tests. And on college campuses too, the push for taking classes you can eventually "make money off of" and also the push from some quarters to (figuratively) blow up the academy wholesale and instead have people do things like go to coding camps, and get little individual certifications. And while I *get* the economic arguments and all....it does seem like it impoverishes us to cut out things like poetry or history or art in the interest of "go out and get a job and work for the next 50-60 years." I'm glad I came up in an era - and in a milieu, with parents who valued education (in all its forms; even though they are both scientists they also valued the humanities and just curiosity in general), so I got the experience of taking deeper dives into poetry or other things that might not serve a strictly "monetary" purpose. Because if we decide all there is to life is earning money...well, we kind of become robots, and we kind of forget the value of things that cannot be bought or sold)
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