A neighbor boy, a friend of my kids, went on to the University of Tennessee and writes a column--I think weekly--for The Beacon, student newspaper. I never see the Beacon anymore, since I long ago quit teaching at UT. But Russ brought home a paper from school with an article about the new UT president, and I just happened to see this piece by Amien. I thought it was marvelous!
Poetry overlooked as form of entertainment
Notes on Art & Literature by Amien Essif
This summer I was designated as the official lawnmower of my parents’ yard. After the novelty wore off and I grew bored, it occurred to me that I could listen to my iPod while I mowed. But my second epiphany was that I didn’t have an iPod. This is no accident either. It has always been my philosophy that when I’m outside, I don’t want to be looking at a screen or plugging my ears, even with good music.
But I thought of another option, one that seemed out of place for someone of my generation, and thus all the more exciting: I would memorize poetry.
In fact, I had already been carrying Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in my wallet for some time now, but I rarely took the time to re-read it. The pleasure I got from keeping the poem in my wallet was more like the pleasure one gets from having a tattoo on one’s butt cheek: you never see it, but you sometimes get the chills when you realize you’re sitting on something special.
Anyway, before attacking the lawn in the blazing heat of Knoxville’s worst summer on record, I read over “Ulysses” a few times and tried to get the first couple of verses into my head.
Then, as I mowed, I started from the beginning: “It little profits that an idle king, by this still hearth, among these barren crags . . . “ And if I forgot a word or a line, I would just skip to the next one I knew. “I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees . . . “ These lines gave me chills as I mauled down pine cones and maple twigs, no less so as I write them now.
By July, I had the poem memorized, and I would recite it every now and then to myself or to a friend if the situation evoked it. It seemed like a cool trick, and I felt like I had done something useful and permanent for myself.
But the real beauty of it didn’t hit me until later when I was sitting on a bench in Chicago, people watching along the lakefront. If I had had an iPod then, I would have been listening to music. But I didn’t, so I started reciting “Ulysses” in a silent voice—a recitation coming from within.
Jim Holt, in an essay for the New York Times, writes, “Mere memorization (of poetry) gives way to performance . . . It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within.”
I’ll admit here that while I have “Ulysses” memorized, word for archaic word, I don’t know what much of it means. But as I said one of these mysterious lines to myself—
Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains. . .
The meaning hit me like a shiver of air or a first swig of wine. Ulysses is dying I thought. Life piled on life is not enough to satisfy him, yet he only has a little of his one life left to him.
I let the tragedy of this hit me in the poetic way, where you don’t feel the pain of it, only the beauty. And I wondered what it would be like if I had a hundred poems or a thousand poems memorized.
As an English major, I’ve read or skimmed my fair share of the Great Classics, but for half of them, I couldn’t recount the plot, much less revisit individual lines and turned phrases. It’s a shame that I don’t carry these words around with me, and I’m always reminded of Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” in which the survivors of a cultural holocaust recall all the words to all the books they had ever read in order to recreate human cultural history.
Fifty years ago—and most parents and grandparents will attest to this—students were taught poetry through memorization. I don’t resent the current emphasis on critical thinking, of course, but it is sad that we’ve more or less dropped our cultural inheritance on the road to some new ideal student: the student with access to so much information that he or she has no time for any individual piece of art. Poetry now is seen as “easy” literature because it is short and usually available on the Internet for free.
But poems as individual creations have become decorations rather than culminations of experience.
So, memorize a poem. Find a favorite something that made you shiver when you first read it, and put it in your head. It is nothing short of discovering a new way to appreciate art.
And you won’t need an iPod.
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