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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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Recent Posts
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Book Readings for Class | Comment [18]
The Know-Nothing Party | Comment [20]
ACT Scores Are In | Comment [4]
Tom Wolfe on Larry Summers, Fiction, and Journalism | Comment [38]
Featured Articles By the Author
Poetry Out Loud
The Poetry Out Loud finals were held in Washington this week, and the winner was a student from the Virgin Islands who recited “Frederick Douglass” by Robert E. Hayden. You can hear him perform here. A story in USA Today on this year’s contest is here, and the Web site for the project is here. Go here for visuals and audio of previous contests.
It’s a national competition like the National Spelling Bee, except that students recite poems instead of spell words. Contestants are scored on a range of performance measures, and they win scholarships for themselves and cash awards for their schools. The competitions are intense and dramatic, with the crowd shouting encouragement and judges swept away by the talent on stage. Last year, more than 100,000 students participated.
The numbers are proof that poetry can become a popular activity for adolescents if educators and organizers cast it right. Most kids never think of opening a volume of verse, and they hate their poetry homework reading. But put them in the audience at a Poetry Out Loud event and they get into it right off. (I’ve seen it happen.)
What are the keys?
One, competition. Kids practice for weeks, battle each other, and shoot for Number One. No touchy-feely-everyone’s-a-winner outlooks.
Two, recitation. Students pick from a list of poems and recite them from memory. They can’t pick their own work (a restriction that earned some criticism in the planning stages), and if they miss a word or forget a line, they lose. “Rote memorization” is a bad term in education circles (see here), but without it, none of the drama and emotion would follow.
Three, drama. For most kids, poetry means a textbook on the desk and a class discussion about form and meaning. Poetry Out Loud, like poetry slams, puts verse into action and makes it a challenge. (See here, and click on “Da’ Poetry Lounge” for a model program.)
Finally, money. When they know that cash depends on how well a student turns a phrase, changes her posture, and modulates her voice, tension rises.
If more high school students get involved, maybe fewer of them will come to college regarding poetry as a stuffy, unnecessary distraction. Maybe they won’t say, as one student did recently when I announced a homework assignment of memorizing 20 lines of verse to recite to the class the next meeting, “Why?”
Posted at 06:27:52 AM on May 2, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
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I agree 100%, Mark. Poetry Out Loud is a fantastic program that models the way to make literature relevant and exciting to students.
— George · May 2, 11:45 AM · #
Never mind the fact that that’s how poetry – literature – was born in the first place: memorizaton and “recitation”/performance…and then memorization of performance, etc., long before the “fixations” of writing. ;-)
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 2, 12:10 PM · #
The danger here is that pre-packaged ways of reading contemporary verse, combined with pre-packaged contemporary free verse, turn the competition into the poetry version of American Idol.
For it is ultimately a competition, and while agon was an ancient element of poetry, it simply isn’t a significant part of the poetry world today, beyond those sorts of competitions ridiculed by sites like foetry.
The literature circle seems to me a place where the dramatic, performatic nature of literature can be given free reign in a collaborative situation that also calls for analysis, interpretation, and judgment of art, as well as for making connections between art and the readers’ personal lives.
— Luther Blissett · May 3, 12:58 AM · #
Regarding contemporary verse: most of the poetry read at Poetry Out Loud isn’t contemporary.
— Mark Bauerlein · May 3, 02:31 AM · #
Sorry. I checked out their website and listened to the audio clips they feature, and it seemed like an inordinate amount of post 1950 poetry by half-rates like Billy Collins and Sharon Olds.
— Luther Blissett · May 3, 04:32 PM · #
Frankly it is unseemly for people to develop things like enthusiasm in the vicinity of poetry—it demeans the form and undermines the layers of dust that bedeck the most distinguished books of poetry in libraries all over the world. People with such excesses of enthusiasm can also be found to engage in sexual or sexual-ish acts—more completely undermining poetry as a form. Then there is the issue of competition in reciting—how plebian! A good poem is best handled by someone unfamiliar with all human experience and good at lording historic eras and their things over contemporary people and matters—yea ol headmaster types. To have youth, in public settings, with enthusiasm, competing for money in the name of poetry and using actual poems is hell itself, sloughing to Anaheim to be born.
— Richard Tabor Greene · May 5, 05:23 AM · #
RTG—there you are, sloughing again. Will you never learn, man?
— barbara · May 5, 11:06 AM · #
Getting the words off the page and into the mouth is good pedagogy. But poetry’s aural-oral dimension is, perhaps, harder to appreciate in an academy which esteems the written response as the exclusive means of demonstrating one’s understanding of a poem or how poetic language “works.” While written responses to poems have some merit, coaching students in how to read with their ears and mouth relieves them of what they feel is the awful task of murdering to dissect.
Of course a good reading, they will soon discover, requires a certain kind of attention to language that is not simply intuitive. Try asking your students, or anyone else, who they become as they are speaking the words being offered. Reading a poem well, like playing a part well is, as K. Burke said decades ago, a worthy and needful task (try on Amy Lowell’s PATTERNS, or Corso’s MARRIAGE or, for the more explicitly politically minded, Ferlinghetti’s I AM WAITING , or CHRIST CLIMBED DOWN). However, I fear that today so many of us are tone-deaf, and that young people, besieged with some awfully unpoetic and vulgar lyrics in songs,get their “sound” education exclusively from their music which is often so utterly prosaic that it trains them out of listening to the music in Shakespeare, Milton, Frost, Kinnel, Oliver etc. And, of course, the utter banality of our President’s efforts at eloquence (see Letterman’s wonderful nightly spoofs) don’t help us retrieve the musicality of language.
Nims’s Anthology of poetry tries to repair the damage. For the more advanced, see Stephen Booth’s work on Shakespeare’s sonnets. It will get the wax out. Good luck to all who persist in honoring the sound of poetry in their classrooms.
— George K · May 5, 12:06 PM · #