"A Winter Mountain" by Benjamin Walton (1973)

The Rise of Creative Reading: Melissa Girard Reviews Catherine Robson's "Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem"

Almost immediately after receiving its copy of Catherine Robson's Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem from Princeton University Press, P&PC sent it back across the country to Melissa Girard (pictured here), a longtime P&PC contributor and intern favorite whose reviews of What Poetry Brings to Business and The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry continue to be some of the most popular postings in P&PC history. In what follows, Girard—an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland whose essays and articles have appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, the Journal of Modern Literature, and The Chronicle of Higher Education—uses the publication of Robson's book to wonder, "What are we teaching students when we ask them to memorize and recite poetry? Are our intentions better, different, or purer than our nineteenth-century counterparts?" and "What is the heart beat of twenty-first century poetry?" We here at P&PC heart what she has to say, and we think you will too.

The recent publication of Caroline Kennedy's Poems to Learn by Heart has people talking about the "lost" art of memorizing and reciting poetry. Throughout the nineteenth century, rote learning was a common feature of both American and British classrooms. Anxious schoolboys, eager to please—and, eventually, schoolgirls too—memorized and recited just about everything, not only poems but also Bible passages, speeches, and, indeed, the vast majority of their "lessons." As pedagogies advanced, rote learning fell out of educational favor. By 1920 in Britain and 1950 in the U.S., the practice of memorizing and reciting poems had ceased to be a mandatory or routine aspect of literary study.

In an interview with NPR's Neal Conan, Kennedy says, "'By rote' has sort of a negative connotation. I don't even know why."

Catherine Robson has a very good explanation for Kennedy. In her sweeping, interdisciplinary study, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, Robson charts the rise and fall of this once-dominant pedagogical practice. Heart Beats significantly deepens our understanding of the memorized poem, bringing clarity and rich historical detail to a topic that is often shrouded in a haze of cultural nostalgia.

Heart Beats is a massive undertaking, and it's hard not to be drawn in by the sheer audacity of it. Like Joan Shelley Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, from which Robson borrows heavily in the U.S.-focused portion of her study, Heart Beats offers a bold, new way to think about the meaning and value of poetry. Traditionally, the field of literary studies has been organized around major authors, historical periods, or national geographies. Robson moves fluidly across time and place, following what she calls "the unbroken line" of poetry memorization and recitation, which remained intact from the late eighteenth century through World War I in the U.K. and World War II in the U.S. As Wordsworth gave way to Whitman and the Victorians bowed to the New Woman, generations of schoolchildren remained united by the shared rhythms of recitation. Heart Beats is a new perspective on literary history, experienced through the beating hearts and sweaty palms of poetry's most assiduous readers.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 offers an institutional history of the memorized poem in British and American public education, and Part 2 provides three case studies in the memorized poem: Felicia Heman's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." Each of these poems featured prominently in school recitations in English-speaking countries for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Afterword also contains short case studies on Rudyard Kipling's "If-" and William Ernest Henley's "Invictus," which, in recent years, have become national favorites in Britain and America, respectively. (Robson has helped me understand why, every semester, at least one of my students begs me to add "Invictus" to our poetry syllabus.)

This institutional focus, alone, is illustrative: Robson dispels some of the nostalgia surrounding the memorized poem by reminding us that it was once a compulsory classroom exercise. To Kennedy and many contemporary proponents of the practice, memorization and recitation are elective or, at least, extra-curricular pursuits. Robson recounts, for instance, how her mother paid her a penny a line to memorize poems when she was young, and, thanks to inflation, Robson paid a friend's child a pound per line to memorize all forty lines of "Casabianca." Such incentives were unavailable in the nineteenth-century classroom.

In its earliest years, poetry's role in the classroom was strictly instrumental: it served, Robson says, as an "unobjectionable" substitute for Scripture. "For many centuries," Robson writes, "verse played only a facilitating role in the learner's progress towards literacy's official goal and its sole true justification, the reading of the Bible" (41).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, in both Britain and America, poetry began to play a more primary and complex role in the "training" of children. One of the most valuable aspects of Robson's work is that she resists the temptation to generalize about the memorized poem. She shows, instead, how elastic this form has been: as pedagogies, educational technologies, students, and teachers changed, we kept coming back to memorization and recitation. They (and now we) keep falling in and out of love with the memorized poem.

Heart Beats assembles a diverse array of materials that document the contradictory experiences people have had memorizing and reciting poetry at school. Robson draws on textbooks, teacher training manuals, educational history and philosophy, students' journals and memoirs, and even classic fictional accounts of memorization and recitation like those in Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Buddenbrooks. These historical materials will be of significant interest to literary scholars, as well as those interested in the history of reading and the history of English education.

Some, like Caroline Kennedy, relish the triumph of learning by heart—of internalizing a poem and making it your own forever. In her recent The Use and Abuse of Literature, Marjorie Garber recounts how we used to speak of someone "having" literature. Samuel Johnson, for instance, said of Milton, "He had probably more than common literature." Johnson doesn't say that Milton wrote great literature, Garber emphasizes, but that he possessed it.

This is not so different from Anne Treneer, a former "scholarship girl" who became a teacher and went on to teach memorization and recitation in her classroom. In her autobiography, School House in the Wind, Treneer remarks, "A child said to me once that she liked poetry because she liked the taste of the nice words in her mouth" (qtd. in Robson 165). Interestingly, Robson argues that positive feelings about the memorized poem are more common in the U.S. than Britain. The two countries have experienced the memorized poem in "nationally distinct fashions," Robson claims, because of unique educational histories, class structures, and the ideology of individualism (234). It is perhaps appropriate, then, that Kennedy—the solitary scion of Camelot—should serve as the current ambassador for the memorized poem in the U.S.

Robson's evocative case study of "Casabianca," a version of which appeared previously in PMLA, is especially sensitive to the aesthetic, bodily pleasures of poetry recitation. Robson writes, "When we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat. We contemporary readers no longer hold poems with regular iambic rhythms at our core" (96). This is one of Robson's key insights about our changing relationship to poetry. When we look back on the nineteenth century, Robson says, it's not that difficult to relate to Victorians' love affair with the novel. We, too, enjoy "satisfyingly fat books" as a form of leisure, an indulgent retreat from our carefully measured working lives (113). However, our connection to nineteenth-century poetry reading (and, hence, readers) is more tenuous:

When we read poetry ... there are few lines connecting us to the memorizing population long ago. Because that particular technology of dissemination fell out of pedagogical favor, we now find it hard to appreciate the special relationship between body and poem that was created by a highly structured set of circumstances. (113) 

"Casabianca," like so many of the poems of the past, felt and meant something different to generations of readers who held its persistent iambic beat, "ti-dum ti-dum," in their "deep heart's core."

Before we get too nostalgic, though, it's worth remembering: we never "lost" or "forgot" the memorized poem. For a variety of complex pedagogical, aesthetic, and political reasons, we—that is, the discipline of English, the field of literary studies, English educators, literary critics, poets, and parents—abandoned it. At least as early as Emerson, thoughtful people, poetry lovers, and committed educators had serious reservations about an institution that practiced students in the art of submission. In "The American Scholar" (1837), Emerson argued against rote memorization and for what he called "creative reading." "One must be an inventor to read well," Emerson writes, and schools, he says, can only serve us "when they aim not to drill, but to create."

At the end of the century, in his "Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal" (1893), John Dewey made a similar argument on behalf of "active" or "volitional" education. Self-realization, Dewey said, "cannot lie in the subordination of self to any law outside itself." Even Ezra Pound, no champion of democracy, to be sure, concurred. As part of his famous break with the metronome of nineteenth-century verse, Pound also argued for an active, engaged educational method. "Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding," Pound writes in his ABC of Reading (84, screaming in all caps original).

For those harboring a romanticized notion of nineteenth-century schoolrooms, of students soaring freely on the "blithe spirit" of poetry, Robson reminds us that rote learning was also a powerful tool of indoctrination. Here, she builds on Angela Sorby's work in Schoolroom Poets: Reading, Recitation, and Childhood in America, 1865-1917, which shows how the recited poem helped to strengthen a culture of the school and nation.

Many students, in fact, didn't even know what the words they were repeating meant; they recited mindlessly, joylessly, desperately. For instance, Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican American "scholarship boy" who attended Berkeley, Stanford, and Columbia, and won a Fulbright fellowship to study English literature in London, has been a harsh critic of the way memorization indoctrinates working class and minority students in particular. In his autobiography, The Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez recounts how he would memorize literature compulsively "to fill the hollow within me and make me feel educated" (qtd. in Robson 184). Dutifully internalizing the words of an English aristocratic canon, Rodriguez grew increasingly alienated from his cultural roots, anxious and displaced.

In her remarkable case study on Gray's "Elegy," Robson places Rodriguez's disillusionment alongside the rage of other scholarship boys (Raymond Williams and Tony Harrison make appearances too), all of whom felt acutely the class dynamics at play in classroom recitations. Gray's famous lines acquired new significance in the minds and mouths of working class students:

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The words of the poem were eventually read and recited by the very "mute inglorious Miltons" that it had rendered silent and unstoried. "Arguably, the twentieth-century grammar school ended up teaching its free-place students more about class than about classics," Robson writes (156).

Today, we tend to think of poetry as a creative, individual, expressive form. Kennedy, for instance, claims that memorization and recitation are creative acts. "When I was growing up, the emphasis was on imitating the style of literary masters," Kennedy writes. "By contrast, today's students are more likely to write about their own lives and challenges" (Poems To Learn By Heart 13).

But Robson's rich, provocative study should make us a bit more skeptical about the creative promise of the memorized poem. (How did I not notice, until now, that Kennedy's Poems To Learn By Heart is published by Disney Press?) I keep thinking about Kamau Brathwaite and all the Caribbean poets he said couldn't get the snow out of their poetry. Part of the experience of colonialism, according to Brathwaite, is a forced poetics—for him, the artificial heart beat of the English iamb. "The hurricane does not roar in pentameter," Brathwaite famously writes.

Robson does not dwell long on the possibility of reinstituting the memorized poem. But, as I read Heart Beats, I found myself wondering if the time is not already upon us. This year, 375,000 American high school students participated in Poetry Out Loud, the national recitation contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. This dynamic, extra-curricular arts program hardly seems like "sheep-herding."

But is it an act of creative reading? What are we teaching students when we ask them to memorize and recite poetry? Are our intentions better, different, or purer than our nineteenth-century counterparts? Are our institutions?

What is the heart beat of twenty-first century poetry?

P&PC Heroes: An Interview with Stephanie Renfrow of NASA's MAVEN mission

Earlier this month, P&PC was sent, well, over the moon upon learning that one of the programs in the "Going to Mars" public outreach efforts surrounding NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter mission is a haiku-writing contest. Yep. You, too, earthling, are invited to compose and submit a "message to Mars" in haiku form, and the three most popular entries as determined by online voting will be burned onto a DVD and then shot into space. How popular an initiative has this been? Well, as of the time of this posting—barely three weeks into the contest and well before the deadline of July 1—nearly 11,000 submissions have been received.

Starstruck by the thought of so many people doing more than just looking up in perfect silence at the stars, we turned our telescopes on new P&PC hero Stephanie Renfrow (pictured here), the Education and Public Outreach lead for the MAVEN mission and the brains behind the haiku-writing contest. Renfrow, who has an MA in Science Writing from Johns Hopkins and a BA in English with a creative writing focus from Middlebury College, works at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Science, home of the MAVEN Principle Investigator. There, knowing full well, as Ray Bradbury once remarked, that "it's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid," Renfrow supports the mission's work by creating and implementing teacher development workshops, K-12 curricula, summer youth camps, and other outreach programs. Here's what she had to tell P&PC about sending poetry into space.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Poetry on a spacecraft? Far out. How did the idea come about?

Stephanie Renfrow: As Education and Public Outreach lead for the MAVEN mission, I'm always looking for ways to bring the mission into the lives of the public, and I'm especially focused on reaching people who may not usually rub elbows with a space mission. I'm also very interested in using new online technologies to generate communities of interest; crowdsourcing is a powerful way to create a two-way connection. Send-your-name efforts are a long-standing and extremely popular way to get the public onboard—literally—with a mission. But sometimes these efforts can become a one-way street that doesn't necessarily encourage participation: you enter a name, and it flies on the spacecraft. Plus the MAVEN spacecraft is not a lander—we don't have an adorable buggy running about on the surface of a far-away planet, enduring adventures and sending back pictures—so it's not as though names entered onto the DVD aboard MAVEN can be carried around and then left in perpetuity on the surface of Mars. Our DVD will be ephemeral. It will survive only as long as MAVEN survives—for a maximum of about six years, before it enters the atmosphere and burns away.

P&PC: So not exactly "To Infinity and Beyond" ...

SR: True enough! We aren't designing a time capsule for a space mission that will, like Voyager, go out into the universe and explore new frontiers through time while carrying everyone's name along for the ride. The MAVEN mission will explore new frontiers in science.

P&PC: Sorry to interrupt. 

SR: No problem! As I was saying, I wanted to create some way of growing a two-way exchange around the MAVEN send-your-name effort and also generate a thoughtful interaction with the public. I started brainstorming ways to do that; my first idea was to have a student art contest, with submissions by young people put up for public vote to determine the official art for MAVEN and inform the DVD cover's label. Public voting just closed on that effort—with 80,000 votes tallied on 377 inspired entries from young people around the world! My second idea, which led to the haiku contest, was to solicit "messages to Mars"—optional notes that people could submit along with their names. Then, the messages would be voted on by the public to crowdsource the best message in honor of the mission.

P&PC: Why solicit poetry in particular—and original poems rather than famous ones like Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"?

SR: Well, the one drawback to my "message to Mars" idea was that it seemed likely that we'd get a lot of less-than-thoughtful responses—you know, "I love Mars" or "Take me with you" or "Hi, Martians." Sometimes, people are at their most creative when they are working within boundaries—just ask a science or engineer tackling a tricky problem developing a space instrument! I wanted to get people thinking about the MAVEN mission, about Mars, about the power of space exploration, about the beauty in our universe. It was a short jump from there to poetry. I also have a personal love for poetry; I especially love the idea that, simply by labeling something a poem—thinking, as you read or write, "This is a poem"—the perception of that slip of writing changes completely. It goes from throw-away words—a text, an email, or a note scribbled on a sticky—to being a statement. Poetry lurks everywhere and in just about everyone. I wanted to bring the thoughtfulness of poetry to MAVEN and offer an opportunity to get regular, not necessarily well-known Earthlings aboard.

P&PC: So, if there's life on another planet, do you think poetry lurks there too? Or is it just an Earthling phenomenon?

SR: "Life" can mean a lot of things. It can mean a tiny microorganism, whose very existence elsewhere in the universe would be, at least in my mind, a kind of poetry. Life can also mean intelligent life—beings whose capabilities meet or surpass humanity's, and whose poetry would perhaps be beyond our ability to comprehend it. Poetry must be everywhere—it certainly is on Planet Earth—but how you define it is an interesting question.

P&PC: Where does your own love for poetry come from?

SR: My fifth grade teacher had us write poetry—she's the one who introduced me to haiku. I started writing then—an entire book of bad poetry by the time I graduated from high school—and never stopped.

P&PC: Why the haiku form?

SR: I did some research on different types of poems. I wanted something short, so people would be more likely to read the poems in the online format. I also wanted something that wouldn't scare people and that would make young people in particular think, "I can do that!"

P&PC: If anyone can submit his or her name to be burned on a DVD that will also be put on the MAVEN, why limit the number of poems to just three?

SR: That was a tough decision. Who knew that we'd already have nearly 11,000 submissions!

P&PC: What's going to happen to the 10,997 that aren't chosen for MAVEN?

SR: The entries that don't win will be online for some unspecified period as an archive of inspiration! And perhaps most importantly, I hope that all 11,000+ people who sat down to write haiku—inexperienced poets and experienced, young poets and old, science-loving poets and new-to-science poets, serious poets and goofy poets—have a spark inside them that they didn't have before. That will be more lasting than anything else about this project.

P&PC: Beyond the sheer number of submissions, what's the public response to the contest been like?

SR: The response has been beyond anything I expected. As the person talking to the media, I've gotten to hear reporters open up and talk to me about their past lives as poets. A woman wrote to us asking permission to submit a haiku on behalf of her mother, who was an accomplished poet before she passed away. Kids have written us asking how they can become scientists. The experience has reinforced, for me, the positive power of creating connections between human beings.

P&PC: Certainly you yourself must have written a haiku for MAVEN. Care to share?

SR: Of course!

Mars mysterious
Thin sky and water-lined face?
MAVEN on its way.

The Poetry of Seinfeld: George's Favorite Poet

Breaking News

News items of immediate concern to the P&PC reader:

NASA lets poets / send haiku to Red Planet / on a MAVEN's wings

"Poets, take note: NASA is looking for a few good haiku to send to the Red Planet aboard its Maven orbiter this fall.... An online public vote will be conducted beginning July 15 to select the top three haiku poems."

•

New Jersey Mayor Wrote Hilariously Unromantic Poetry to Mistress

"During the affair, he would write the assistant, Corletta Hicks, romantic poetry that wonderfully mixes the lofty and mundane."

•

Johnny Depp is Heard over heels in love again

"The actress [Amber Heard] had vowed to stay single after her split from the Hollywood star but crumbled after he sent her a handwritten poem and a bouquet of roses every day through September."

Back to The New Northwest: Suffragist Poetry in the Gold Man Review

Regular P&PC readers will remember our ongoing interest in the poetry published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in The New Northwest—a weekly suffragist newspaper published out of Portland by Abigail Scott Duniway, a leading voice in the fight for Oregon women's suffrage. Between 2010 and 2012, we did a four part series on this poetry, which oftentimes appeared on the paper's front page, which was frequently written by Willamette Valley writers long before folks like William Stafford put Oregon on the national poetry map, and which was sometimes sourced or cut-and-pasted from other newspapers around the country (a common practice in an age when poets and their publishers didn't seem to care about regulating the circulation of verse via copyright laws). Then, in 2012 and 2013, we collated a set of these poems for use in the development of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon, an original and experimental script produced at Willamette University earlier this year in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage.

Now Salem's start-up literary magazine, the Gold Man Review, has joined in the fun, reprinting a portfolio of seven suffragist poems from The New Northwest in its second issue—the one with the snazzy cover pictured above, which puns on the design characteristics of mass market women's magazines to transform the Gold Man pioneer who currently tops the state's capitol building into a Gold Woman pioneer. Themed around the "pioneer spirit," the issue joins the work of nineteenth-century poets with over twenty-five pieces by people writing in Oregon today, and it's also got a long interview with P&PC about The New Northwest, the history of women's suffrage in Oregon, the situation of American poetry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the poems P&PC selected for reprinting in Gold Man with the assistance of students in a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class we taught last Spring.

When you get a chance, pick up a copy of Gold Man Review for yourself. In the meantime, we're giving you a small taste of our interview here—a portion that we think displays some of the best of what an interdisciplinary liberal arts college can offer students: experience working with and using archives, in-class study, cross-departmental collaboration, research into the historical forms and genres of poetry, and engagement with social and community endeavors. We here at P&PC don't talk about the pedagogical possibilities of popular poetry all that frequently, but here's an example of what we do when we're not running the office and bringing you your weekly fix.

Gold Man Review: Why did you and your class decide to pick these poems [for republication in Gold Man Review]?

Mike Chasar: In addition to studying the poems, the most recent instantiation of my "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class also partnered with an experimental scriptwriting class in the Theatre Department that wanted to create a play about the history and legacy of women's suffrage in Oregon as one way to mark and commemorate 2012 as the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage. (See Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012 for other such events.) As part of the experimental nature of the script, the Theatre class thought it would be cool to start with a bunch of poems from The New Northwest, using them as raw material to collage, break up, or interlace through the script in funky and innovative ways. It can sometimes be difficult to figure out what to "do" with archival materials other than, well, archive them and study them; so we thought it would be interesting to motivate them in another way, too—toward the creation of a new piece of art.

So, our first goal was to select poems to present to that class, and toward that end we had two main priorities: 1) select poems that surveyed the different types of arguments being made at the time for extending the vote to women; and 2) select poems with varying poetic strategies, rhetorical components, and performance possibilities. We thought the former would gesture to some of the political complexities of that historical moment that get lost in a debate framed simply as "for" or "against" women’s suffrage. (As with the debate about healthcare today, people aren't just for or against it, but have different reasons for being for or against it, or partly for it and partly against it—you get the idea.) And we thought the latter would shine a light on the diversity of styles and poetic techniques of popular verse, which oftentimes gets characterized as entirely "sentimental" and generally homogenous in style, format, rhetoric, etc.; in actuality, the poetry is pretty diverse—song lyrics, persona poems, narrative poems, lyric poems, satire, dialect, etc.—so we wanted to honor that aspect of the writing.

I made the selections for Gold Man keeping these two elements in mind as well, so that we have inspir- ational song lyrics ("Campaign Song"), two very different dramatic monologues that make different arguments about women and the vote ("The Perplexed Housekeeper" and "'Siah’s Vote"), a serious narrative with children as main characters ("Reasons"), a humorous narrative ("Wife Versus Horse"), a romance ("Katie Lee and Willie Grey"), and a lyrical extended metaphor ("My Ship").

In addition to the generic diversity— all are also part of a culture of poetry that lent itself to oral delivery or performance—the poems also make a pretty wide variety of arguments for how and why women should get the vote: "The Perplexed Housekeeper" suggests that women are already excellent multi-taskers and won't be burdened with the additional responsibilities of voting; "'Siah’s Vote" argues that women already participate in voting via the advice they give to their menfolk; "Campaign Song" says women will help clean up a corrupted culture of voting, but also makes the problematic claim that "John Chinaman" can now do the work once done by women and thus free women up for public life; and "The Ship" shows us a character abandoned and forlorn because what must be the "ship of state" mentioned in Duniway's poem never comes for her. That's just a quick overview, but you get the idea: poets are using different poetic strategies to make different types of arguments about the political enfranchisement or disenfranchisement of women.

The Poetry of Al Bundy and Married... with Children