Got Poetry?

"Got Poetry," published in the New York Times
By JIM HOLT

Published: April 2, 2009

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone.

This may seem eccentric, not to say masochistic. If you are a baby boomer like me (or older), your high school English teacher probably forced you to learn some poetry by heart for class recitation. How we howled in protest! What was the point of memorizing Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” sonnet or — in Middle English, no less! — the first 18 lines of “The Canterbury Tales”? Our teacher could never answer this question to our satisfaction; the best she could do was some drivel about our feeling “culturally confident.” But memorize them we did, in big painful chunks, by rote repetition. (There is torture lurking in the very word “rote,” which is conjectured to come from the Latin rota, meaning “wheel.”)

A few lucky types seem to memorize great swaths of poetry without even trying. George Orwell said that when a verse passage “has really rung the bell” — as the early T. S. Eliot invariably did for him — he could remember 20 or 30 lines after a single reading. Samuel Johnson, according to Boswell, had a similar mnemonic gift. Christopher Hitchens — who carries around in his head a small anthology of verse, all of which, as his friend Ian McEwan says, is “instantly neurologically available” — also seems to absorb poems by osmosis. (Or maybe he swots them up late at night after his dinner-party guests have all passed out.) Richard Howard once told me that he eased into the memorization habit as a child, when his parents rewarded him with a dime for each poem he learned.

For the rest of us, the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I’ve already got. At the moment, I’m 22 lines into Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I’ll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.

The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then 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. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.

That’s my case for learning poetry by heart. It’s all about pleasure. And it’s a cheap pleasure. Between the covers of any decent anthology you have an entire sea to swim in. If you don’t have one left over from your college days, any good bookstore, new or used, will offer an embarrassment of choices for a few bucks — Oxford, Penguin, Norton, etc. Or you might try ESSENTIAL PLEASURES: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (Norton, $29.95), edited by the former United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

But which poems to memorize? I started with Auden’s “This Lunar Beauty” — a little lyric that Stephen Spender once said was the most beautiful thing in all of Auden. Next I tried Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” — a Nabokov novel compressed into 56 lines. Browning, although not quite a first-rate poet, proved to be especially fun to memorize because of his exotic vocabulary and jaw-breaking diction. For sheer length, the most ambitious poem I’ve tackled is Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (a favorite, as it happens, of Stephen King). At 204 lines, it takes 10 minutes to get through — just the time it takes me to walk from my apartment to the Chinese laundry.

By now, my mental treasury of verse pretty much spans everything from Chaucer up to the present. (Tennyson was the last major gap, which I’m just now plugging.) There’s a heavy concentration of Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats (whose symbolic hocus-pocus finally makes some sense to me), plenty of delightful warhorses like “To His Coy Mistress” and “Kubla Khan” and a good bit of light verse (like a long poem about a duck-billed platypus that becomes a brilliant diplomat only to resign in disgrace after laying an egg). Although I’m a little thin on contemporary verse, one of the best poems I’ve learned by heart is Richard Wilbur’s “Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” Its delicate rhythms at first proved rebarbative to my memory, but when I finally got it down I was so delighted with it that I wrote Wilbur a fan letter. He wrote back, saying that he always advised his students to memorize poems: “If one is delayed in a bus terminal, or sitting in a foxhole, it’s wonderful to have an inner anthology to say over, yet again, in one’s mind.”

One should be skeptical, though, of some of the alleged advantages cited by champions of poetry memorization. “I wonder if anyone who has memorized a lot of poetry . . . can fail to write coherent sentences and paragraphs,” Robert Pinsky once said. Well, responded David Bromwich, just take a look at the autobiography of Marlon Brando, who memorized heaps of Shakespeare.

Are there cognitive benefits? I sometimes feel that my mnemonic horsepower is increasing, but that’s probably an illusion. “Memorizing poetry does seem to make people a bit better at memorizing poetry,” Geoffrey Nunberg has observed, “but there’s no evidence that the skill carries over to other tasks.”

Nor, as I have found, will memorizing poetry make you more popular. Rather the reverse. No one wants to hear you declaim it. Almost no one, anyway. I do have one friend, a Wall Street bond-trader, who can’t get enough of my recitations. He takes me to the Grand Havana Cigar Club, high above Midtown Manhattan, and sits rapt as I intone, “The unpurged images of day recede. . . .” He calls to one of the stunningly pretty waitresses. “Come over here and listen to my friend recite this Yeats poem.” Oh dear.

The grandest claim for memorizing poetry is made by Clive James, himself a formidable repository of memorized verse. In his book “Cultural Amnesia,” James declares that “the future of the humanities as a common possession depends on the restoration of a simple, single ideal: getting poetry by heart.” A noble sentiment. I just wish that James had given us some reason for thinking it was true.

I don’t have one myself, but I hope that I have at least dispelled three myths.

Myth No. 1: Poetry is painful to memorize. It is not at all painful. Just do a line or two a day.

Myth No. 2: There isn’t enough room in your memory to store a lot of poetry. Bad analogy. Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar.

Myth No. 3: Everyone needs an iPod. You do not need an iPod. Memorize poetry instead.

- - -

The good folks at Norton have, in conjunction with the Essential Pleasures collection, created the Poems Out Loud site. Well worth checking it out.

One Art

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

~ ~ ~

Bishop rewrote this superb villanelle seventeen times before getting it right.

For more on the revisions, see Brett Candlish Millier's "The Drafts of 'One Art'."

Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country

McSweeney's, the publishing company founded by Dave Eggers (the author of the excellent, an actually appropriately named A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), and 826 National, a national, non-profit organization that promotes and teaches literacy skills to youth, have teamed up to publish a collection of letters, words of wisdom, and advice for President-elect Obama.

From the McSweeney's store:

A few days after the election of Barack Obama, kids around the country were asked to provide advice and guidance to their new president. In this collection, arriving at inauguration time, there's loads of advice for the president, often hilarious, sometimes heartfelt and occasionally downright practical. Students from all over the country reach out to the 44th president, speaking to the issues closest to their hearts, relating their life stories, and asking for help. Topics include the economy, education, war, global warming, race relations in America and immigration. The book also includes letters about snow cones, puppies, microwavable burritos, dinosaur projects, multiplication and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, reportedly haunting a White House bedroom.

Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country includes such advice as:
"If I were president, I would help all nations, even Hawaii."
— Chad Timsing, age 9, Los Angeles

"I really hope you put America back together. No pressure though."
— Sheenie Shannon Yip, age 13, Seattle

"1. Fly to the White House in a helicopter. 2. Walk in. 3. Wipe feet. 4. Walk to the Oval Office. 5. Sit down in a chair. 6. Put hand sanitizer on hands. 7. Enjoy moment. 8. Get up. 9. Get in car. 10. Go to the dog pound."
— Chandler Browne, age 12, Chicago

And, while it wasn't advice, exactly, we thought this was worth sharing:
"You are just like a big me." — Avante Price, age 7, Seattle

Cute, huh?

For more hilarious and touching excerpts from McSweeney's, click here.

To purchase Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids' Letters to President Obama (ed. Jory John) directly from 826 National, click here.

Unwavering bands of light: What's post- the post?

I'm fond of talking, theorizing, about what comes after Postmodernism. Some see the whole PoMo thing as a paradigmatic example of exaggerated, pretentious intellectualism. I don't.

As a literary and cultural movement, it has given us useful language and a situational discourse to understand the underpinnings - the psyche - of our contemporary culture. More importantly, it's given voice to a multiplicity of perspectives that have traditionally fallen outside of academic discourse. It has sought to liberate marginalized groups by not only giving them a voice, but also by seeking to understand what it means to "be" ~someone~.

It essentially asks my favorite question: Why are you you? Its responses to this question have been various, and they typically suggest that the Postmodern identity is ideologically interpellated, socially constructed, subject to contextualized performative imperatives, unstable, under continual construction, without a core essence, open to continual possibility, and so on. I don't find this scary, or even existentially overwhelming, as some do. I actually find it hopeful. And important.

But what comes next? Historically, at least in America, cultural shifts - in literature, art, film, etc. - have coincided with wars. As many theorists have observed, cultural production is intrinsically linked to both economics and the widespread concerns of the masses. These things show up in the art. During periods of war, economics are affected as are our cultural concerns. The time is beyond ripe.

Appropriately the tone and focus of various academic discourses has been shifting: I've noticed a greater attention being paid to aesthetics. Postmodernism essentially did away with aesthetic concerns, noting that aesthetic taste is, on one hand, subjective (and thus socially constructed) and, on the other, without essence (like the PoMo subject). If anything, PoMo gave us the aesthetic of the abject: piss, shit, blood, vomit, that which is within me and I violently expel (read Kristeva, if you dare). I think we've gotten what we need from the abject and are ready for a new sense of aesthetics.

I think this also points towards the development of a new understanding of ontology, of being. I think that we'll see something that seems like a return to considerations of essentialized identity, but I think these considerations will be unfettered from religious associations, and, by and large, will be free from considerations of the permanence or infinite status of the soul. Rather, I think these considerations will, in some ways be extensions of pre-existing understandings of subjectivity - and will thus have an existential component. In other words, I think we may see considerations of the subject reconsider the possibility of a vestige of selfhood that isn't explained by the complex interrelationships of genetic preconditions, environmental factors, social constructions, and so on. I think we'll see a Post-Postmodern formation of subjectivity that considers both the complex interaction, and the process of putting together fragments of selfhood, as resulting in a ~something else~ that isn't necessarily reducible to the focus of previous considerations of subjectivity.

I'm seeing evidence of this shift a lot these days (but perhaps it is only the reflection of my own perspective). Consider the lyrics from the new Animal Collective album I recently mentioned:

Am I really all the things that are outside of me?

Would I complete myself without the things I like around?

Does the music that I make play on my awkward face?

Do you appreciate the subtleties of taste buds?

Or maybe Vonnegut - being, as always, ahead of his time - wrote it best when, after writing himself into Breakfast of Champions as both author and character, changed his perspective from this:

I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

to this (in the voice of the book's artist Rabo Karabekian):

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal - the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us - in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

I'm still working this out, but I'm curious: What do you think, you unwavering band of light, you.

"On Not Winning the Nobel Prize"

From Doris Lessing's 2007 Nobel Lecture, given in acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year she wrote The Cleft (click here for the New York Times review):

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

Read the full lecture here, or get it as a .pdf courtesy Nobelprize.org.

BTW: Orhan Pamuk's 2006 lecture - "My Father's Suitcase" - is also wonderful.

Susan Sontag's Journals

I haven't read Reborn yet, but I want to.

As Daryll Pickney describes it in his New Yorker review:

Sontag’s “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a fascinating document of her apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice. The volume takes us from her last days at North Hollywood High School to the year that, now living in New York, she published her first novel, “The Benefactor.”

NPR's John Freeman points out that:

Reborn is full of earnest exhortations to read books (Moll Flanders, another tale of self-creation) and smile less ("Think of Blake. He didn't smile for others"), as well as descriptions of lectures attended and films inhaled, sometimes at the rate of three a day.

I'll admit that posthumously publishing someone's journals is worse than hanging their dirty undies out to dry (and for everyone to see), and the fact that it was her own son who published them is a bit...bothersome. But, according to Richard Eder of The New York Times, Rieff published the journals knowing that "Sontag had left her papers without restrictions to the University of California, Los Angeles. If he did not do the job, thus at least keeping some control, someone else would."

I guess Junior didn't think he could have destroyed the journals himself (which is what he says his mother would have done were she alive). And I'm glad he didn't. Here's the thing about seeing someone's dirty undies blowing in the breeze: it's hard not to look.

Besides, I love reading journals written during a period of intense creativity. Take Kafka's journal entries produced during the writing of The Trial. They're wonderful insights into not only the writer's mind, but also into the process of writing.

For example:

August 29. The end of one chapter a failure; another chapter, which began beautifully, I shall hardly--or rather certainly not--be able to continue as beautifully, while at the time, during the night, I should certainly have succeeded with it. But I must not forsake myself, I am entirely alone.

September 1. In complete helplessness barely wrote two pages.

October 15. Two weeks of good work; full insight into my situation occasionally.

November 1. Yesterday, after a long time, made a great deal of progress; today again virtually nothing; the two weeks since my vacation have been almost a complete loss.

December 19. Yesterday wrote "The Village Schoolmaster" ["The Giant Mole"] almost without knowing it...

January 20. The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

Excerpts from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Vol. II, 1914-1923

You see? Even Kafka struggled. And you see? Pretty interesting, huh? I bet Sontag's journals are even better.

Neologisms

Jefferey Euginedes, a writer who's probably better known for The Virgin Suicides - a book made famous by Sofia Coppola's filmic interpretation (accompanied by a fine soundtrack composed and produced by Air) - than for his Pulitzer-winning masterpiece Middlesex, writes, in the voice of Middlesex's protagonist and narrator Calliope:

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.”

And so I propose that we should come up with better words for expressing more complex emotions. They don't even have to be "Germanic train-car constructions" like Schadenfreude.

Like, for example, "the irresistible urge to 'zerbert' a baby's belly." How's about "Zerbunger"?

And, really, what's the word for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar"? I'd really like to know. I'd use this word.

And how's about a word to describe "the agony of entertaining unappreciative house-guests," or "the joy of discovering someone has done a household chore you were putting off"?

How's about some help here? I'm suffering from deneologificiency.