From the issue dated November 23, 2001
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The Companionship of a PoemBy BILLY COLLINSDuring the three decades that I have taught English at Lehman College, I've witnessed some dramatic and turbulent changes.
In the English department, we continued to assign Paradise Lost, Kubla Kahn, and The Sound and the Fury, but now we had to devote much of our energy to teaching basic skills in reading and writing. That change helped me discover that there was a place for poetry even in the most basic composition courses, which further led me to see the broader connections between poetry and learning, and -- to put it more personally -- between what I do as a poet and what I do as a teacher. I came to realize that to study poetry was to replicate the way we learn and think. When we read a poem, we enter the consciousness of another. It requires that we loosen some of our fixed notions in order to accommodate another point of view -- which is a model of the kind of intellectual openness and conceptual sympathy that a liberal education seeks to encourage. To follow the connections in a metaphor is to make a mental leap, to exercise an imaginative agility, even to open a new synapse as two disparate things are linked. Flying a kite, say, can suddenly be seen as a kind of upside-down fishing; a flock of blackbirds may rise up like a handful of thrown, black confetti. I began to see connections between surprise and learning. Further, to see how poetry fits language into the confines of form is to experience the packaging of knowledge, the need for information to be shaped and contoured to be intelligible. It is to understand that form is a way of thinking, an angle of approach. Other parallels between poetry and learning have also intrigued me, including those that relate to speed. As the poet William Matthews once wrote, one of the most basic appeals of poetry is its ability to slow us down. To begin reading a poem is to feel a resistance in the poem's language and its distinct meter, its compression of meaning, and its insistence on conveying itself one line at a time. Such features will not allow us to rush as we would hurry through the morning newspaper. The formal arrangement of a poem checks our haste. It is no accident that probably the best-known poem by an American poet is Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," a poem about the need to slow down and, eventually, to stop in our tracks. Our supersonic, digital age demands rapidity. And, understandably, students want colleges to speed them toward their future goals. But the true tempo of education, and the best thing about any college, is a slowing down of things to an earlier, more human, pulse -- the leisurely pace of deliberation. Education may be the way to slow back down from the computer to the television, to the newspaper, to the essay, to the novel and, finally, to poetry. Perhaps the most important connection between poetry and learning has to do with memory. Anyone who has taken a poetry course with me knows that I am big on memorization. That is probably because I am afraid all my students will quickly forget everything that I have told them; at least, if they memorize a poem, they will leave with a little wheel of Robert Frost or Christina Rossetti turning in their heads. These days, however, memorization has low status as a pedagogic tool. It has long been devalued as quaint and old-fashioned, more suitable to the little red schoolhouse than the modern university. Learning by rote has taken on mechanical, robotic connotations. And the emphasis today is on the externalization of information, the shift of knowledge from the self to an outer dimension of high-speed information. Why memorize when you could look it up?, as the baseball player Casey Stengel more or less said. But with all due respect to him, we desire to produce students who can do more than just look it up, students whose minds are significantly furnished by their educations, and perhaps whose hearts and sympathies have been enlarged by them. To memorize is not only to possess something, whether it be a poem or a succession of kings. It is to make what is memorized an almost physical part of us, to turn it into a companion. Let us remember that poetry began as a memory system. Mnemosyne was, by Zeus, the mother of all the Muses. In poetry's most ancient form, the now-familiar features of rhyme, meter, repetition, alliteration, and the like were simply mnemonic devices -- tricks to facilitate the storage and retrieval of information, and vital information at that. In an oral culture, before it was possible to write anything down or look it up, knowledge had only one reliquary: the human memory, the library of the mind. The history of one's people, one's family genealogy, survival facts about hunting, fishing, and farming -- all were saved from oblivion by what we now call poetic devices. Today, some may view poetry as a sport of dilettantes, despite its ability to say what cannot be said otherwise. But originally poetry was necessary for survival, for human identity, and it issued forth from the wellsprings of human memory. Milan Kundera speaks of "a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting." Today's student is electronically agile at "looking it up" -- whatever that "it" may be -- but the process of learning still aims to make the mind more ample by internalizing cultural and scientific information. The virtual library of the Internet is at our fingertips, but every student is in the process of evolving into a kind of walking library as the shelves of his or her memory are gradually stacked with learning. My predecessor as Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky, recently started what he called the Favorite Poem Project, a kind of national poll that seeks out ordinary Americans who know a poem by heart. His campaign is a counterweight to the notion that poetry belongs exclusively to academe, and it was revealing to see and hear an airline hostess reciting Frost, a telephone lineman saying his Sandburg. For my own part as Poet Laureate, I am starting a program called "POETRY 180." The "180" stands for the number of days in the school year, and the idea is that a poem will be read every day -- not studied or analyzed, just read -- to the entire student body of high schools around the country. The poems and information about using them will soon appear on the Library of Congress's Web site (http://www.loc.gov). I hope to convince students that, in addition to being a subject to be studied, poetry can be a feature of everyday life. Also, in my fantasy commencement exercise, every graduate of every college would come up to the stage and recite a handful of lines of poetry before receiving a diploma. That will not happen -- it would really slow things down. But I can still hope that some are silently carrying, along with whatever else has enthralled them, the companionship of a poem. Billy Collins is the U.S. poet laureate and the author of five books of poetry, including Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). FORGETFULNESS By Billy Collins The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of. It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good-bye, and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem you used to know by heart. From Questions About Angels, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (1999). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B5
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education