Recently some students of mine organized a Lenten social media fast, and asked me to be a faculty sponsor. Those who gathered at the meeting were few enough to fit around a small table, but the sentiments they brought were similar: all of them were tired. All complained they needed a furlough from the panopticon in which social media imprisons middle and high school students, who more than any other social group are governed by the vox populi. I see social media as only one manifestation of a creature, fed by hormones, that is as old as humankind, and have no intention of attacking it here. But it is notable that the idea of “creating mental space” in one’s life by unplugging from Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat (the “big three” for students at the school where I teach) resonated so strongly for these students, and that they unanimously talked about replacing these predominantly visual/aural mediums with some form of print: the Bible, a novel, or a book of poems. Many of them also spoke about using the time to memorize poetry or scripture.
As a teacher, I perform small touchdown celebration-style victory dances on the inside whenever a student of group of students initiates such a rich-sounding activity. When a student learns to value the profits of mental discipline, they have become truly educated. Learning has become a tool they can use to shape their interaction with society rather than a crucible through which they need to pass before moving on as a passive member of society.
Yet the particular activity these students chose reveals the tension they perceive between what Mike Chasar, in a recent article for Poetry, called the “…oral and print value economies.”[1] Chasar’s piece is a response to Catherine Robson’s new book Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, a study of memorization in the British and American school systems, and its effect on the students who emerged from those systems in the mid and late twentieth century.
Heart Beats is partly the story of memorization’s decline as a popular assessment tool, and therefore as a cultural influence in the United States. Chasar’s response argues that memorization has escaped the classroom only to flourish in other settings, many of them still scholastic. These range from “Poetry Out Loud competitions to Def Poetry, all sorts of YouTube videos, and Disney’s celebrity-studded ‘A Poem Is…’ video series that premiered during National Poetry Month 2011,” and are proof that the funerary tone of Robson’s book is inappropriate in light of the exploding role poetry memorization is beginning to occupy in the age of the Internet.[2]
Chasar rightly notes that the marriage of poetry memorization to the World Wide Web is a strange one, since oral and print cultures often represent competing cultural economies. My students’ desire to shift away from the apparently “less meaningful” visual/oral mediums of Instagram and Snapchat to “more meaningful” printed media handily illustrates that competition.
Especially in the world of education, the association of refinement and complexity with print and of shallowness and transience with aural culture runs deep.
This loyalty is strongest of all in the Humanities. As Chasar writes, no matter how popular Poetry Out Loud and ‘A Poem Is…’ become, from the perspective of educators and high-performing students “…oral/aural formats are tainted by affiliation with the values of the worlds of oral communication out of which people are meant to be educated.”[3] These “worlds of oral communication” would seem to be represented by pop and hip-hop music, slam poetry, sitcom television, and many other forms of apparently “low culture” from which my students feel the need to distance themselves. They assume that to enrich their mental experience during a season of contemplation, they need to abandon aural and visual media in favor of print.
Yet this assumption is troublesome, because without recourse to brain science or sociology, my students and I cannot say anything meaningful about the relative quality of aural versus print media that is not anecdotal. Reading a book simply “feels different.” More strange in light of Chasar and Robson’s insights is the instinct each of my students shared that the ultimate commitment to absorbing “high-quality” media would be to memorize poetry. But as Robson’s book astutely observes, to memorize a poem is to snatch it back into the aural cultural economy from which the industry of poetry has worked hard to separate it.
One assumes that when we memorize a poem, we intend at some point to recite it, possibly during casual conversation. Doing so would make it part of our aural culture. But a poem that enters the vernacular loses some of its sheen. I’ve often cracked jokes to peers and students about a decontextualized quotation from Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” decaled on the wall near our eighth grade lockers. It is, of course, the “I took the road less traveled by” passage, reduced to a truism (not to mention misinterpreted) through overuse in public discourse. What makes me roll my eyes at that quotation? Its association with the supposedly “low” aural cultural economy, out of which it is my job to elevate students by means of encouragement, clever class exercises, or outright coercion.
“The sea was not a mask,” Wallace Stevens writes in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “No more was she./ The song and water were not medleyed sound/ Even if what she sang was what she heard.”[4] These lines express something about the unbridgeable gap between a person’s internal experience and the external world. The woman singing as she walks the shore might sing about the ocean’s thunder; the sounds might even intermingle. But they are not the same sound, not the same phenomena. A brilliant poet well-read in twentieth century philosophy, Stevens wrote a great deal about that separation between the inner and exterior worlds. He thought of poetry as similar to the woman’s song: it originated within and could almost communicate with the outside.
My students and I might not share Stevens’s complex and bleak vision of art’s role in the world, but our assumptions about the relative quality of aural and written media illustrate a dichotomy just as stark. We think that to memorize a poem is to enhance our inner experience, because printed poetry is the penultimate expression of the inner experience. But what happens when on those very rare occasions, we encounter a poem’s “moment” in our everyday lives and (spurning the eye-rolls and social stigma we know we will suffer as a result) recite it?
When we do, we risk corrupting poetry’s prestige in the name of keeping it relevant to someone other than career academicians who have shanghaied it by accident of their enthusiasm, bureaucratic writing culture, and understandable devotion to systematic analysis. I once had the opportunity to ask the great Alaskan nonfiction writer Leslie Leyland Fields if she ever considered devoting herself seriously to poetry. I was an aspiring poet myself. Her reply was that she considered poetry a dead language; a series of dusty exchanges between professorial types who had forgotten that the purpose of language was to communicate. Memorized and recited poems are the strongest evidence available against her case.
Printed poetry captures interior experiences—what Stevens called our “pure exclusive music.” When we read it, our inner worlds are stimulated and enriched. But only memorized poetry can create cultures. There have been occasions when, walking into a room full of chattering ninth graders, I have heard them exchanging scraps of The Odyssey’s invocation of the muse as the punchline of a joke. As long as jokes like these continue, Homer’s language will enjoy a place among the living.
The Swedish poet Thomas Tranströmer likened poetry to the notes kids pass back and forth in the classroom while that teacher History drones away at the podium. Robert Hass noted that now they are texting each other instead, but the intimacy and irreverence of poetry is captured well by either metaphor. It may be that under the pressure exerted by the Internet’s swelling hegemony, the value distinctions between print and aural cultures still so thoroughly propped up in educated minds will begin to crumble. If so, poetry only stands to benefit, because its relegation to the page of the academic journal is a tiny span on its lurid and decidedly unacademic timeline. It is not absorption into lowbrow culture that endangers poetry, but imprisonment in the highbrow. In any case, despite the loud and worried voices of its advocates, poetry is in no danger of extinction, because nothing so fine and so useless will ever be abandoned by young students once they’ve gotten a taste for it. Nothing is as essential as the inessential.
[1] Mike Chasar, “Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem: Hearing Art’s Heartbeat,” Poetry, January 5, 2015, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/249542.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Mike Chasar, “Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem: Hearing Art’s Heartbeat,” Poetry, January 5, 2015, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/249542.
[4] Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/idea-order-key-west.
