Take care of the sense

By Amy Baranski

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves, says the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, and John Hollander as his final point in the introduction to Committed to Memory.

My copy arrived today.

Hollander is a poet, a critic, an editor, and wears a beard in his dust jacket picture.

I can't tell you precisely why I felt annoyed when I first opened the book, it had a stiff air, but Hollander's introduction won me over. His blatant disdain for oratory foibles of today's newscasters was the clincher.

I have always loved reading aloud. Since I was a little girl. I don't know why. It's just how I prefer to read, from line to line, page to page, cover to cover. The silence of the page is nice too. I read silently now too, as I've grown into my ornery adult suit, and am prone to headaches more easily. Says Hollander:

"...to hear a poem read aloud by someone who understands it, and who wishes to share that understanding with someone else, can be a crucial experience, instructing the silently reading eye ever thereafter to hear what it is seeing. Better yet is reading aloud that way oneself."

Such joy!

I Want to Pay Homage, Too! But to What?

posted by Melissa
I just found this passage on www.poets.org

Memorize a Poem   

"We speak of memorizing as getting something 'by heart,' which really means 'by head.' But getting a poem or prose passage truly 'by heart' implies getting it by mind and memory and understanding and delight." —John Hollander

Select a poem from the book you're reading, or an old favorite, and begin to memorize it. While memorization may seem like a relic from your school days, the rewards of recalling a private anthology of well-loved poems are both immediate and long-lasting.

If you are new to memorization, pick a short poem with a strong rhythmic underpinning. Rhythm has long been used as a tool to aid the memory, particularly by oral storytellers before the advent of the written word. By choosing and memorizing a poem that you love, you connect yourself to this long tradition of passing along stories and customs through the power of poetic language. Make sure that you understand the sense of the poem—this will give meaning to the rote act of learning each line and transform a string of sounds into a message that you can easily absorb and transmit.

Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize (1996) is a great guide to choosing poems which lend themselves easily to memorization. Published in conjunction with The Academy of American Poets and edited by John Hollander, this anthology presents a group of classic, celebrated poems which emphasizes the pleasure of memorization and recitation.

You can also browse a list of poems to memorize, perform, or recite—part of a feature on Great Poems to Teach.

I think this advice is going to be very helpful to me, and I might just purchase the book today.  Is it too late to change my mind?  Maybe I do have commitment issues when it comes to poetry?  I want to memorize the "Summer" poem by Kasischke, but is it too modern?  Thew title of our month is "Memorize a Classic Poem."  This website, poets.org, has a lot of great information.

If you click on the "Great Poems to Teach" link above, you can find some wonderful audio and visual poetry pieces like this one by Lucille Clifton, "Homage to My Hips."

Damn that was good.  So many questions, so many choices!  What would you choose?

-Melissa