JISCMail - SIDNEY-SPENSER Archives

I speak each poem as if sharing my true state of mind, anxiety, hope, despair, logic, determination--whatever the poem calls for--with my students. And in fact, I need not say "as if," because I really do inhabit the poems I know by heart. Most students love to have class begin this way (it comes up frequently on evaluations), and of course, this is a powerful way to model for them how to read, speak and feel an early modern poem. It's also a good way to prove it is not so heard to learn a poem by heart. Here's what I usually do for speaking/memorizing assignments in poetry courses: I require students to memorize and speak two sonnets to me by mid-semester. They then have the option of learning 70 lines of poetry (4-6 poems they choose, within some guidelines, as a final--instead of taking a traditional final exam. Sometimes I make it 84 lines. Usually every student in classes of about 30 chooses the speaking poems option; now and then two or three students choose a traditional test instead.) Here are guidelines I give students when they are learning their first two poems: You will learn by heart two sonnets and speak these to me in my office or over coffee at the Spa, if you would find that enjoyable. And to boot, you'd be enhancing the aesthetic value of discourse in our public spaces! You need not be especially dramatic; speak in a way that comes naturally to you. But you must speak with thoughtfulness and conviction, and therefore, with few if any hesitations and no interjected phrases such as "wait, wait, I know itŠŠ.I really doŠ." I want to hear whole poems spoken with your whole mind, not lines retrieved bit by bit from an unfeeling memory bank! You may choose any two sonnets as long as they are written by Renaissance poets on our syllabus. As you learn each poem, be the speaker of the poem; experience the state of mind the speaker seems to experience; and feel why one statement, question, or image leads to the next. It is within your power to know your poems extremely well and to make them compelling to yourself and your listener(s). If learning a poem feels to you like studying facts for an exam or taking inventory in a storeroom, STOP! Read and reread the poem, read any available notes, aemail me for help in clarifying tricky syntax, and then try to learn the poem sentence-by-sentence, or clause-by-clause, not line-by-line as if it were a list of disparate parts. It is tedious and quite useless to try to memorize a poem without experiencing the speaker's state of mind and sense of purpose. ******************* Finally, when students learn poems by heart, they write better papers!! All my experience affirms that learning poems by heart can be the closest kind of reading, as it demands whole-hearted focus and engagement. You cannot ignore any tiny part of a poem when you learn it by heart! You therefore cannot ignore couter-evidence for a pet thesis you are starting to run away with. Therefore, when students memorize poems (so they can speak them as if the words were coming from their own minds and hearts), they are far more likely to root their arguments in the actual language of the poem instead of superimposing this theory or that on the poem, using a couple of lines as a springboard to dive into any which direction.

Learning poems by heart and speaking them, students also often discover how to distinguish between a great poem and a good one: great ones are much easier to memorize because they allow you to act and feel something true to human motivation, intellect, and emotion. In other words, almost all students discover which poems are fully motivated all the way through, structured so that one thought or image really does follow another in a way that represents a genuine state of mind, and which poems are not--which poems have some arbitrariness and replaceable phrasing and do not represent a compelling episode of thought or speech. BTW, I often use the term "speak" instead of "perform" because it relaxes students who are not natural performers. It also emphasizes experiencing poems within first and foremost; then performing (if that is a goal) falls into place more readily. "Recite" always sounds a bit too formal and academic to me. I often use the phrase "know by heart" instead of "memorize" to emphasize how rich and meaningful this pursuit can and should be--how it can in fact be the opposite of a technical or didactic exercise. I have actually written at some length on ways to make speaking and listening to early modern poems integral to teaching. The essay is: "Flirting with Eternity: Teaching Form and Meter in a Renaissance Poetry Course," Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen. Palgrave Macmillan 2002. Also, I talk about some of these ideas in: "Pursuing the Subtle Thief: Teaching Meter in Milton's Short Poems," in the newish MLA volume edited by none other than Peter C. Herman, Approaches to Teaching Milton's Shorter Poetry and Prose. I would be glad to talk more about this with anyone interested, and if this post were not already so long, I would describe how the funniest story to emerge from my years of having students learn poems by heart could easily have been the most tragic. It involves a student from the midwest who didn't ski being taken on black diamond trails at Sugarloaf by his roommates, and the ensuing helmet-less wipe-out, concussion, and effects on the students senior project, which was to learn by heart and perform half of Shakespeare's Sonnets. I would also be glad to describe Astrophil and Stella: The Movie, a gem created by three other seniors. Thanks to many of you for all the great ideas in this discussion. Elizabeth