On Wednesday 27th September, two other English trainees and I attended the ‘Share a Favourite Poem’ reading at Homerton College, held in honour of National Poetry Day. Tired after a day at school and loaded down, as per usual for me, with what felt like thousands of folders (containing work as yet undone), I can’t deny that part of me considered simply heading home. Ultimately, however, I reminded myself that this would be a valuable opportunity to encounter a range of poems that I could add to my repertoire for lessons (the prospect of free wine and scones did not dampen my enthusiasm either).
The ten speakers immediately inspired my admiration and nerves on their behalf. Even as a person who has acted in plays over the years, I actually find few things more daunting than speaking as myself, in a well-lit room, to an intimate audience! Each had to speak their poem once through, explain the reasoning behind their choice, and then repeat it. To my surprise, the repeated poems added a huge amount to the original, and often felt like a completely different poem. What’s more, the speakers themselves were visibly more relaxed the second time around, and in being so, adjusted their intonation and pacing, displaying so much more of their own take on the text. They were all absorbing in their own ways, but particular favourite of mine was this by George Eliot
A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart,
chaff and grain together,
knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it,
keep what is worth keeping,
and with a breath of kindness,
blow the rest away.
This was an interesting one because, as the speaker admitted, it’s not even technically a ‘poem’! It’s originally a prose piece, but it didn’t matter; when she spoke it, it became poetry. What was particularly striking about it was that the speaker had the words memorised, retained since childhood. As an observer, you really got the sense that, over the years, these words had come back to her. Perhaps when venting to a friend over coffee, or just exchanging those looks we share with the best of friends, in which a thousand things can be said silently. It’s quite possible that I was just projecting my own experiences onto it…but that was the thing that made it great. The ease with which she said the words gave the sense that they had taken on many layers of meaning over the course of her life, and became more relatable to me because of all the memories that were there behind her reading.
This got me thinking about the power of memorised poetry. I knew that it now forms a mandatory part of the primary school curriculum. Prior to this evening, I would have regarded it with an eye-rolling reaction, the same that I give to most things associated with that four letter word beginning with G and rhyming with stove. I would definitely have thought of it as hopelessly outdated, prompting thoughts of, in the words of Simon Armitage, students ‘chew[ing] their way through The Lady of Shalott in a feigned and foreign RP accent’. It was absolutely not something I would have considered asking my future students to partake in.
These recitations were nothing like my stilted preconceptions. When the memorised poems were spoken, they reflected so much of the speaker’s own personality. They weren’t putting on a performance; they were being themselves, just borrowing someone else’s words to show it.
Afterwards (whilst helping myself to another scone), I had an interesting conversation with Debbie, one of the people behind The Poetry and Memory Project. She said how overwhelmingly positive people had been in recounting their memories of learning poetry by heart. She spoke of how they felt as if the poem was ‘inside’ them, and once it was there, they could get ‘inside’ it as well. This forced me to consider not only my notions of rote poetry learning, but also how rigid my views on recent educational reforms can be. They are not all, I need to remind myself, automatically awful!
For less confident students in particular, working on a poem until it becomes second nature could rid them of the worries of stumbling over unfamiliar language, freeing them to focus on rhythms, themes and nuances. Appropriate, it seems, for a National Poetry Day of which the theme was ‘Freedom’. If I was to use it in school, I would most likely give my students the ‘freedom’ to choose a poem they cared about, at least from a wide selection. This would (hopefully) mean that the finished product would be something they felt ownership and pride over. Perhaps it could be something, like the speakers at this poetry reading, that they would remember with ease twenty, thirty, or even more years into the future.
The evening definitely opened my eyes, on a practical level, to ten new poems which I can use in my teaching. But even more than that, to the potential value memorised poems can hold, ensuring they are something I will consider bringing to my classroom, or, at the very least, stop rolling my eyes about.
Further reading:
‘Primary school children to be expected to learn and recite poetry’, The Press Association: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jun/10/primary-school-children-recite-poetry
‘Poetry Should be Subversive’, Simon Armitage: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/12/poetry-should-be-subversive
The Poetry and Memory Project: http://www.poetryandmemory.com/publications
Cambridge PGCE English 