Emily Dickinson a metaphysical giant for such a shrinking violet. A favorite teacher of mine in a Cistercian monastery used to read one of her poems before each class. I cannot but pick one of many of my favorites:

A LITTLE madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown,
Who ponders this tremendous scene—
This whole experiment of green,
As if it were his own!

Read this Bernie Madoff!!

My favorite poet is John Keats. I memorized his Ode to A Nightingale and presented it as a dramatic recitation at a Toastmasters meeting once. I love to recite his poetry aloud as Keats’s words “taste” delicious! Great poetry suffuses all the senses. To be able to pull out a poem from memory and experience the physical power of words at any time, in any place, is the great gift of Beauty that poetry provides humanity.

Probably the easiest method of memory here is in haiku! Here are two of my favorites I’ve made and “recite” regularly:

being human is
being a monster trying
not to be scary

i give you the drugs
you give me all your money
i give you the drugs

…here is a poem I came up with for a WZBC radio show asking for listener “statements”:

This statement is a secret projected through thousands of skulls that will never know.

I teach English at Phillips Exeter Academy and despite the old-fashioned quality of the assignment, I still find it valuable to assign students to memorize Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be”. Those students open to the experience discover the wonderful structure of language and meaning, and can follow the thoughts blinking and connecting in Hamlet’s mind. They also find Shakespeare’s language in the rest of the play becoming more manageable.

Myself, I love knowing two of Frost’s perfect little gems by heart. One of them is perfect for this spring season and comes to me each time I see the newest leaves: Nothing Gold can Stay:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf’s a flower,
but only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief;
So Dawn goes down to day–
Nothing Gold can Stay.

Thanks for highlighting this wonderful actuality. If you think about it, many many already have poems memorized in the form of lyrics. Repetition and music make the activity fun and easy.
We also were made to memorize poems and speeches on a regular basis from elementary school (I’m 50 this year). It’s shocking to hear that this isn’t a regular activity in American schools any longer.
Thanks for the show.

Great Topic!

Lost my life savings, and lost our house…
but, if I memorize two lines of poetry every day, I forgive the bankers who robbed my family.

I love Poetry; and already forgotten my anger.

I had a teacher, Sister Agnes Patrice, who taught a generation of us 7 lines of OLD ENGLISH of Bauwolf(sp?) 20 years latter, I do not remember it, but there are several of us that still can recite it. She was a teacher that you hated when you had her, but you quickly realized that she really had taught you something afterwards and you would love her. SAPS (as we called her,) is some 90 years old and still alive. She frequently attends St Martha’s Church in Okemos, MI

A line a day Aha!

I am not a baby boomer but a generation x-er, who was also made to learn poetry by heart as a child. At the time I thought it was a huge bore,and a bother but I still remember the poems that I learned then today and enjoy them as gifts from special teachers.

The thing is, I’ve tried to do the same thing as an adult and I’ve thought that there must be a change in the way the brain works or something which makes memorization more difficult because I’ve found it nearly impossible today. I’ll try the line a day technique.

i love this idea and want to start. i’m new to poetry–do you have some suggestions for good poems to memorize?

Great show. One of my enduring memories of my Marine Coips father was his love of poetry. He had a vast memory of poetry from his days on the farm as a boy in Minnesota. His Belgian French grandmother, aunts and uncles who raised him, memorized poetry and gave readings for fun and friendship. Dad was no wimp — he was a dive bomber pilot in the Pacific Theater, and later was a test pilot for experimental jets. He also designed heat-seeking missiles! But he loved poetry and made us memorize it, everything from the funny lines of Ogden Nash to Longfellow to Shakespeare.

The last time I took a drive with Dad, when was in his late 70’s, he launched into five minutes of an old poem he called “The Legend of Sir Launfal,” which told the tale of a knight who disdained the leper at the castle gate while searching for the Holy Grail. Dad recited the poem from memory. The poem I remember the most is “El Dorado,” which chronicles the search for the City of Gold. It ends, “Ride, boldy ride, the Shade replied, if you search for El Dorado.”

Dad also loved “The Highwayman,” and disdained my sister’s insistence that we hear the version by the Irish singer Danny Doyle. Dad said the song could never do justice to the poem. However, my sister insisted on playing the song, and Dad loved it! My father shed a few tears with my sisters and me as we played it through, Dad honking into his omnipresent handkerchief.

Dad is gone now, but when I hear and recite poetry, I remember him and love him even more.

Monica (Nollet) Roland, Lockport, NY

anyone lived in a pretty how town
with up so floating many bells down
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did

ee cummings

Thank you to Mr. Pike, 9th grade English, 1976, I could rattle off this entire poem.

And thanks to my mom —

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
to dig the sandy shore
My holes were empty like a cup
In every hole the sea came up
til it could come no more

My mom made us memorize a poem for her for Mother’s Day every year when I was a child, instead of giving her a gift.
What a gift for both of us–I still remember many of them!

My favorite from childhood–
Get up, get up you lazy head
Get up you lazy sinner!
We need those sheets for tablecloths,
It’s nearly time for dinner!

Great show!

I am 60 started memorizing poetry on my own in my 2o’s after reading a novel about WWI called Johnny Got His Gun in which a man is left unable to communicate and paralyzed – I realized I’d die of boredom! so I started memorizing while I walked. they are like stones once collected that I can take out turn over and look at again. I remember the poem but also the time when i learned it. Christine, Derby, VT

After being on hold for a bit they said unfortunately there would be no original poems shared, so here is my favorite long(er) form piece (in addition to the haikus above!):

frequent, eloquent, unkempt rejuvenation
sun shining star stardom domination
substrata
stratusphere
status here: X Y Z coordination
Motorola queue guided vacation
sober electronic nation
multinational risk-taken giving loose
living space hippie faded lucent dream bohemian scream
run out of the hop on top
the pile of pills chills thrills
EC censor fear of faces less than places
wars still kill people, years still ware
multiplie divisible eleven times
i tried to design the escape route
but it won’t fit in the system structure
someone took her for a ride
under the slide its dark but you don’t feel light
their heavy density pressure contained constrained
its plain – the pain is ponderous, nautious
ingredients:
common sense
confidence
innocence
evidence
conspirator, motion blur, red orange blood yellow
good did good ugly movements action reacted reactors
three eyes accidentally placed new born face

—
Funny all the folks mentioning Keats & Yates, that weird lover Wilde is on mine… (from The Smiths “Cemetry Gates”) I would love to hear some lines of hip-hop recited!

A special moment of teaching in second grade: We were assigned to select a poem and memorize it. I learned William Blake’s
Piping down the alleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
and he laughing said to me:
Pipe a song about a Lamb!”
it goes on
“Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.”
So he vanish’d from my sight,
And I pluck’d a hollow reed.”
it goes on
I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.

It was oversimple, but maybe better to share at the dinner table when competing to show off what we learned in school than state capitals.

Something memorized and become fabric of me in my 20s is Emily Dickinson’s
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep eternity.

Bread as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land.

Something of the rebel there that I needed.

Thanks to a poetry loving 11th grade English teacher in Albany NY some 60 years ago, I think I memorized this poem the first time he recited it. I felt then it was about me and my grandfather; today I am the grandmother to whom my grandchildren jump up from the chair and kiss me.

Great show, but with all due respect, everyone’s reciting much too quickly, except the gentleman who’s on right now. The words need to sink in.

My late grandfather regularly recited this bit of doggerel to me:

The wise old owl sat in the oak
The more he heard the less he spoke
the less he spoke the more he heard
Why can’t we be like that old bird?

I have no idea where it originated (perhaps I shall look it up someday) but the older I grow, the more sense I find in this verse.

I’d suggest long backpacking trips– poetry volumes are the ultra-lightweight food for thought, and song to your step!

I’m an organic farmer and there is nothing like Li-Young Lee’s poem “From Blossoms” encouraging us to “carry within us an orchard.”

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

And to me, it is a small, jubilant peach of a miracle that for all the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs out there, Garrison Keillor’s on the airwaves with poetry and humor. Thanks!

Also, there are entire cultures where oral tradition is the keystone of the continuation of their entire way of life.
It makes me rather nervous how contemporary people rely more and more on electronic technology which could arguably make them mentally and physically lazy. I hope that public and private schools and parents and individuals will see how vital it is to memorize.

In celebration of spring, and the indelible memory that daffodils imprint on your memory, here are a few lines from Wordsworth’s Daffodils:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
and dances with the daffodils.

As always, Tom Ashbrook is On Point with his programming. I have been writing and memorizing rhythm and poetry (rap) for years. Although many don’t regard rap as poetry, it has been an outlet for me for years. I wrote while completing my bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees from MIT in mechanical engineering. I even published a book accompanied by an audio CD. An excerpt from one of the poems is below:

So this is what it’s all about,
I used to doubt I would receive it,
Thought that it was make believe
And didn’t exist,
I almost even settled
With an artificial princess,
But divine intervention prevented it,
God as my witness,
I’m a saved man,
He had a plan bigger than
I could understand,
Dropped me to land
On my feet again,
Now I stand,
With you as part
Of my forever,
Ever since we got together,
Things have only gotten better,
Never, worry cause I
Got you right here at my side,
More than, a steady girlfriend,
You my wife and bride,
For life,
Not to be mentioned like a prison sentence,
A ball and chain don’t bear
The least bit of resemblance,
Embedded in our hearts,
Like it ain’t nobody’s business,
Is a love that’s never ending,
And we’re in it to the finish,
So from now until the infinite,
I’m fond of every minute of it,
Not a thing is limited,
When dealing with our loving

My mother in law started a tradition this last Christmas that we would all memorize something and recite it on Christmas Eve! It was great fun! I recited Dr. Suess;

Its a troublesome world,
And all the people who are in it,
Are troubled with troubles each and every minute
So you ought to be thankful a whole heaping lot,
For the people and places you are luck you are not!

Wonderful program today! Many poems from my childhood are still with me.

This welcome topic provides some balance and relief to the awful economic news of the day.

Please return to this topic of poetry on a regular basis.

Thanks!

My son never had the internal organization that makes school manageable. However he loved and still loves rhymes and rhyming. In 5th grade, he won a Cambridge Poetry Award with this poem.
A Flight through the Woods

By Leo Walsh
April 13, 2001

Snishy, snishy snickering snake

slipping soundlessly through the swamp

quietly pondering which way to go

choosing a path with lots of ferns.

Long and noisy, that path was

with chirps and squeaks and some growls too.

I slid along and never strayed

until into the woods, I flew

rising above the mossy floor

I saw myself; a picture in a pool

with a tiny splash

down I came and swam back

to my home at last.

He is now a young adult and, though poetry doesn’t hold the same place in his life, music does. He’s a bass player. Most definately core to the poetic structure of music, I think!

I have loved poetry since I was a kid. My mom played records by the Weavers and other folk music for me when I was 4 or 5 and I learned many by heart. Then I saw on TV Robert Frost reading poems from a podium in a field and I said that that was what I wanted to do. Yes, I write and am published but I also read and read and read poetry. And I make sure I read poetry to others at every opportunity. When my son was just a boy I would read Ezra Pound to him and he would laugh especially at his poem Personea. Now he writes novels. I am recently published in the Easter edition of the Sewanee Theological Review.

Loved your show on poetry recitation. Please do it again — annually at the very least. Maybe seasonally. Those of us who love to memorize poetry have very few opportunities to share our enthusiasm for such a rewarding pursuit.

I attribute my love of poetry recitation to my father, who used to recite Shakespeare at the dinner table. He played the role of Brutus in a high school production of Julius Caesar many many years before I was born, but could recite it all by heart.

It was great to hear several of my favorite poems on today’s show and also to learn some new ones, which I will now look up and perhaps add to my repertoire.

Your show made my day and reminded me how the most satisfying things in life are really right at hand — and don’t cost a cent.

This is an addendum to my aborted intro above. The poem I referred to is:

Jenny Kissed Me by Leigh Hunt

Jenny kissed me when we met, jumping from the chair she sat in.
Time you thief who love to get sweets for your list put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, say that health and wealth have missed me.
Say I’m growing old-but add: Jenny kissed me.

Frost and Byron definitely, try “happiness makes in height for what it lacks in length”. It is a poem that is relatively short with simple language and expressing feelings that all should be able to relate to.

[...] Point” today to talk more about the pleasures of reciting poetry. (Look, Ma, no notes!) Click here for the [...]

[...] [...]

Go to http://www.poetryoutloud.org and hear high school students recite classic poetry from memory in performances that may give you chills.

“She could toss a dishpan full of popcorn higher than the gaslight mantle and catch it coming down,
Like a waterfall of laughter, butter and salted, where has she gone?”

When I was 7, I decided to memorize a verse of a poem from the New Yorker magazine, and 44 years later, there it still is. I wonder who wrote it?

[...] Jim Holt follows up his piece in the NY Times Book Review on the joys of memorization with an NPR interview. [...]

Fantastic program. The first hour today was important, and very well done. But thank goodness you followed with this hour, for perspective, for joy, to remind of what really matters.

That was an inspiring hour about poetry. A fellow called in from what sounded like a mobile phone and recited some poems from a name I did not catch or recognize…Phil Mangeddy or Philbin Getty ? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[...] with Tom Ashbrook had a fun show this week on memorizing poetry. You can listen to the podcast here or on iTunes. Check it out for some insightful thoughts on memorizing [...]

Jim,
Thank you very much for your talking on this subject. It’s always good to get the poetry neurons firing.

For your consideration, please be aware you are (as Joseph Campbell quotes) “standing on a whale fishing for minnows.”

Though you nicely and humbly chronicle your poetical cognitive pleasures, current brain science breaks the bounds of mind-body and can take your inquiries further. Take a look at Antonio Demasio’s work or even a quick glance to Oliver Saks’ recent musings on music. In this technologically centered world the trick is to shake the rational dust out of our 19 Century rhetorical boxes. After all, the current mortgage fiasco just showed us the limits of rationalism, didn’t it? What is it that Greenspan said…. “this thinking doesn’t make sense?”

My job as a sometimes actor and lowly CUNY voice and speech professor teaching to non-majors is to open up a person as well as a mind. Physiologically, learning by rote and learning by heart are two completely different neural processes. Fortunately Western science is coming to its “senses.” Soon it may prove what our pre-industrialized selves, and the East has always known- that there is human value in speaking poetry… beyond the basic “it’s good for your head stuff.”

You might really wanna to talk with Gary Glazner, Managing Director of The Bowery Poetry Club– check out his work with poetry and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America.

Sincerely,
tom marion

When a caller recited Verlaine’s “Les sanglot longs…” on the program I guessed that it would be that poem even before she began. It’s one of the best known formalistic exercises in French poetry and it’s also part of the French curriculum in many high schools in America. I also discovered it in my kids’ high school homework. It sounded as an interesting enough challenge to construct an English translation that would be faithful to both the form and the content. Now, English is one of the tougher languages for versification due to its phonetics and morphology. That’s why even the classics of English-language poetry cut corners sometimes in a way that would be frowned upon in other languages, especially when the meter is concerned. Even so, translations of this poem I have found were annoyingly bad on all counts. Enough so, that I decided to do this exercise myself, figuring that it would be hard to do worse. It was too late to call it in, so, here is goes:

AUTUMNAL SONG
from Paul Verlaine

The languid moans
Of fiddle tones
Of the fall
Imbue my heart
With longing hard
In its thrall.

I stifle and pale
When I inhale
At clock’s beep,
I reminisce
Of old days’ bliss
And I weep.

I glide away
In ill wind’s sway
To and fro,
It blows with ease
Me like dead leaves
Or dry straw.

EMILY SMARTPHONES

This is my twitter to the world
That never twittered me–
The inane things of daily life
Deserving obscurity.

Incessant stream of messages–
They come in starts and fits–
What one’s eating. whom one’s dating—
A universe of twits!

Thanks so much for this hour of On Point. As a regular listener, I must say that this hour ranks among On Point’s finest within the second hour slot of “off the front page” programming.

Jim Holt’s rushing adrenalin may have contributed to a bit faster tempo in his (memorized!) recitations than he probably would have preferred. Nonetheless, his selections and insightful commentary, along and his ability (together with Tom and Jack) to likewise engage your callers made for a truly enjoyable hour of listening. Radio doesn’t get much better than this.

Holt’s comment that the act of memorizing and reciting poetry becomes its reward hit the mark, as the rich internal resounding that results when one has planted the seeds of good verse within the mind is ultimately a private experience. With the onset of spring in the air — a theme which must rival the “wooing of women” — I can’t help but now be reminded of two gems; one Pope’s, the other Wordsworth’s. Having taken root so long ago, they now rush faster from the mind than my fingers can manage:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expiates in a life to come.

(- Alexander Pope)

*********************************

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inner eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

(- William Wordsworth — last verse only from “I wandered lonely as a cloud”)

Thanks so much for this hour of On Point. As a regular listener, I must say that this hour ranks among On Point’s finest within the second hour slot of “off the front page” programming.

Jim Holt’s rushing adrenalin may have contributed to a bit faster tempo in his (memorized!) recitations than he probably would have preferred. Nonetheless, his selections and insightful commentary, along with his ability (together with Tom and Jack) to likewise engage your callers made for a truly enjoyable hour. Radio doesn’t get much better than this.

Holt’s comment that the act of memorizing and reciting poetry becomes its reward hit the mark, as the rich internal resounding that results when one has planted the seeds of good verse within the mind is ultimately a private experience. With the onset of spring in the air — a theme which must rival the “wooing of women” — I can’t help but now be reminded of two gems. Having taken root so long ago, they now rush faster from the mind than my fingers can manage:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expiates in a life to come.

(- Alexander Pope)

*********************************

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inner eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

(- William Wordsworth — last verse only from “I wandered lonely as a cloud”)

Sorry about the double post. The first appeared to have “aborted.” Only afterward did I see that it had taken.

My 2 favorite poems:

Langston Hughes:

God wish the rent
Were heaven sent.

And a Japanese koan:

What a moon,
Even the thief
Pauses to stare.

Hello Matt–

I think the poet that you are looking for is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The caller also specifically referenced a collection of poems by Ferlinghetti, “A Coney Island of the Mind”. Hope this helps.

One of my favorite poems is Billy Collins’ “On Turning Ten.” It’s especially poigniant this week as on April 13th my daughter did turn ten. I had been reciting parts of the poem to her for the last week or so (even though it’s a little depressing), including the lines “It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,/time to turn the first big number.” I’m often reciting bits of poetry to my children so she didn’t appear to be paying much attention. Then yesterday when she was trying to convince me to let her get her ears pierced, she showed she HAD been listening. When I asked her why she should get pierced ears, she said, “Because now I’m ten–the first big number.”

Last Sunday, my Dad who is 90. stood up and as he stood he recited a poem called Work (I forget who it was written by but he remembers). He recited the entire poem and at the end we figured that it had been in his head since 1933 when he learned it as a teen in Puerto Rico. He hadn’t thought of it or recited it in all those years. Amazing!
Loved the show.