this article got me thinking about that phrase, 'knowing something by
heart.' that's more apt than we recognize, because, as she points out,
having these things inside causes a change in oneself. at a time when
even the most educated people have an unexamined coziness with the
worst that is thought and said, what a revelation it would be to
exchange the TAAS, and, more damagingly, the wall-to-wall preparation
for it, with 'rime of the ancient mariner' and 'paradise lost.'

this is one of the few things-ain't-what-they-used-to-be articles that
i'd agree with. for one short blip of history -- a generation or two,
common american children were treated like greek aristocracy. one
day....

--

barry
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Lost Eloquence

December 29, 2002
By CAROL MUSKE-DUKES

LOS ANGELES - The poem in my head goes something like this: Sunset
and evening star/And one clear call for me!/O Captain my
Captain!/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers/I'm nobody!Who
are you?

These fragments were put there by my mother, who can recite, by heart,
pages and pages of verse by Tennyson, Milton, Wordsworth, Longfellow
and Dickinson. On occasion, I can manage to recite the poems that
contribute to my voice-over poem in their entirety. My mother -- whose
voice (like the sound of waves, a kind of sea of words) is one of my
earliest memories, my first sense of consciousness and language --
gave me this gift.

She is 85, a member of perhaps the last generation of Americans who
learned poems and orations by rote in classes dedicated to the art of
elocution. This long-ago discredited pedagogical tradition generated a
commonplace eloquence among ordinary Americans who knew how to (as
they put it) "quote." Poems are still memorized in some classrooms but
not "put to heart" in a way that would prompt this more quotidian
public expression.

Thus my mother, who grew up on the prairie of North Dakota during the
Great Depression, spent time in high school memorizing the great
thoughts and music of the ages. She never forgot these poems and
managed to regale all who would listen (mostly her husband and
children), and by virtue of this word-hoard was able to effortlessly
(almost eerily) produce a precise appropriate quote for any occasion.
Often social or familial failings inspired her. For example (to me,
frowning at my spinach): "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/To
have a thankless child." Or an aside to a sibling whining in line at
the bank: "They also serve who only stand and wait."

For those who love poetry, the recent announcement that Ruth Lilly had
donated about $100 million to Poetry magazine was a welcome boost. But
to me the most illuminating aspect of this extraordinary news was not
the size of the gift, but rather a subsequent revelation that the
journal gets roughly 90,000 submissions a year -- yet its circulation
peaks at just 10,000. Literary magazine editors have pondered this
kind of awkward imbalance for some time. It seems there are a lot of
would-be poets out there. But it seems that many are writers who write
without reading. And the power of reciting in order to share a poem or
to comfort oneself with its words, seems almost unknown.

Years ago, when I taught in the graduate program in writing at
Columbia, the late Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was also on the
faculty. Brodsky famously infuriated the students in his workshop on
the first day of class, when he would announce that each student would
be expected to memorize several poems (some lengthy) and recite them
aloud. The students - even if they had known that Brodsky had learned
English in dissenter's exile in Russia by putting to heart the poems
of Auden, among others - were outraged at first.

There was talk among students of refusing to comply with this
requirement. Then they began to recite the poems learned by heart in
class -- and out of class. By the end of the term, students were
"speaking" the poems of Auden and Bishop and Keats and Wyatt with
dramatic authority and real enjoyment. Something had happened to
change their minds. The poems they'd learned were now in their blood,
beating with their hearts.

In the workshops I teach I continue to ask students to choose poems to
memorize. Recently, a young woman loudly resisted what she called a
boring exercise. But after memorizing Emily Dickinson, Countee Cullen,
Sylvia Plath and several haiku by Issa, she was still going strong -
delighted with how the words rolled trippingly off her tongue. "I own
these poems now," she said. (When I ask students early in the semester
if they know a poem by heart, I usually hear the names Shel
Silverstein and Dr. Seuss and occasionally Robert Frost. They often
say that they can't memorize long poems, but then I ask them if they
know the lyrics of "Gilligan's Island" or "The Brady Bunch," and my
point is made.)

Lately I've been dropping in at a local preschool and have been
reminded how much even little children love to memorize poems. They
absorbed rather effortlessly Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Swing" (How
do you like to go up in a swing?/Up in the air so blue?), accompanied
by gliding hand and body movements. They loved the repetition, the
chiming of the words and images.

My mother taught me this poem as she pushed me on a swing in our
backyard in St. Paul, Minn. when I was about their age. She would push
me out and away from her on the "question" line (How do you like);
then I would fly back on the "comment" line (Up in the air so blue).
Like my young students, I was swinging within the shape of the words;
I was learning words with my body as well as my brain; I was swinging,
like them, within what would last forever -- within the body of the
poem itself.



Carol Muske-Dukes, who teaches creative writing at the University of
Southern California, is the author, most recently, of ``Married to the
Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood.''

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