NPM: Day 4

My seventh graders are providing our daily poems these days by reciting poems they have memorized. In other years, I've let them choose their own, and their choices were straying further and further from what I considered good. This year I picked out a pile of short poems I thought worth memorizing, and passed them out. They were allowed to trade with someone else, but other than that, they got what they got.

Yesterday I shared Tracy K. Smith's podcast; on one of her episodes, she talked about memorized poems. She said that a poem you know by heart is "an arsenal of insight and delight." I love that, and have found it true in my own life. I am thankful that I was forced to memorize a variety of poems, and so I feel only limited guilt about forcing my students to memorize poems similarly.

I've had this article open on my desktop for a while; it's a Billy Collins article about the poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." First he writes about why he likes the poem, and then he describes how the poem saved him when he had to have an MRI before he knew what that was.

Here's a snippet:

"Once you’ve installed the poem in your memory, it’s there to comfort you—or at least distract you—wherever you are.

I think that’s one reason I’ve always made my literature students choose a poem to memorize, even if it’s just something short—a little poem by, say, Emily Dickinson. They’re very resistant to it at first. There’s a collective groan when I tell them what they’re going to have to do.  I think it’s because memorization is hard. You can't fake it the way you might in responding to an essay question. Either you have it by heart, or you don’t.

And yet once they do get a poem memorized, they can’t wait to come into my office to say it. I love watching that movement from thinking of memorization as a kind of drudgery, to seeing it as internalizing, claiming, owning a poem. It’s no longer just something in a textbook—it’s something that you’ve placed within yourself."

Another tab is this YouTube channel, "52 Poems in 52 Weeks." I haven't watched all the videos, but I love the idea of memorizing that many beautiful poems. Talk about an "arsenal of insight and delight!" It looks as though he only got about halfway through his project, but still, 26 poems is impressive. I don't know why he stopped and while I found his professional website, it hasn't been updated in a while. Here he is reciting the "Time for Everything" passage from Ecclesiastes.

The fourth line of the Progressive Poem is here.