Graded High School, English Department 2013-2014 POETRY RECITATION 2014

WHAT: For the sixth year the English Department will hold a Poetry Recitation, involving all students in the high school. Students will each choose a poem to recite (around 14-40 lines; not to exceed 2 minutes when recited) that was originally written in English. Each selection should be written by someone from the Poet List below or from one of the established poetry sites also listed below, in consultation with their teacher. Students are not allowed to repeat a poem that they have done in the past (listed in an archive in the English department). Song lyrics are not allowed as poems for this event. There are thousands of terrific English- language poems to be recited out in the world; we suggest that students avoid poems that have been frequently been done by other students in past Poetry Recitations.

During the month of February and early March, students will recite their poems in their English classes. Each teacher will choose the three best performers (the semifinalists), who will then recite the poem for the English department. Teachers will then decide on the two best performers per grade level and two other outstanding performances from any grade level (the finalists). Finalists will recite their poems in an assembly at the beginning of April, and an outside panel of judges will choose the top performances from the whole high school.

HOW TO: The following tips will help you memorize your poem, from a piece by John Hollander, “Committed to Memory.” The complete piece can be found on Poets.org (URL below).

Memorizing Westminster Bridge." On the other hand, memorizing will We speak of memorizing as getting something "by make clearer than even the most studious written analysis heart," which really means "by head." But getting a poem or the difference in the ways in which the octave-sestet prose passage truly "by heart" implies getting it by mind and pattern in the "Italian form" of the sonnet can be deployed: memory and understanding and delight. There are many John Donne's "At the round earth's imagin'd corners" ways to memorize texts of any kind, but for verse, reading expands one long complex imperative in its first eight lines; lines aloud and listening to yourself as you recite them is then, starting with a "But. . .," qualifies the octave in the final crucial. It is partly like memorizing a song whose tune is that six lines of the sestet. But Milton's famous sonnet on his of the words themselves. The kind of ordering or sequence blindness systematically bridges what we might think of as or logical progression of parts of the poem—lines, groups a logical space of refraction or qualification usually found of lines, stanzas, sections, verse paragraphs—will figure between octave and sestet. His sentence "But patience, to strongly in the way we hold it together in memory. prevent/That murmur, soon replies. . ." connects the lines and even the sections that are almost like two stanzas in Different poems get remembered in different ways—a this sort of sonnet, with a strong enjambment. ballad or other narrative poem as opposed to a lyrical poem that unfolds in its own kind of sequence—a strophic poem When memorizing a poem, too, we become aware of or a passage of rhymed or blank verse that moves on more the resonances of particular words. For example, a discursively. In memorizing and reciting, one becomes even memorized reading of Shelley's "Ozymandias" might very more deeply aware of pattern and structure: stanza forms, well come up with the two meanings of "mock" in "The repeating patterns of anaphora (as in Thomas Carew's hand that mocked them"—imitate (here, in sculpture) and lovely "Ask me no more") or refrain. We notice, too, how ridicule or deride. And note the change of the mood of the the argument catalogue or narrative unfolds itself through single auxiliary verb "do" in the first refrain of Dylan the stanzas, sections, or even groups of lines. Thomas's "Do not go gentle. - ." from imperative to indicative in the central tercets, or the subtle shifts in Certainly a poem's structure—the way in which it's put meaning of the second refrain. This poem also exemplifies together—becomes very important; as you memorize a the form called "villanelle." With its repeating double sonnet, you almost get to feel the way in which it can be refrains, a poem like this is rather easy to memorize; on the argumentative or more expressively meditative in its other hand, reciting it aloud, "performing" it—as will be structure. Shakespeare's Sonnet #18: "Shall I compare thee seen in a moment—presents interesting challenges to the to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and more intonation and emphasis given to repeated elements. temperate," for example, is arranged in quatrains and a summary couplet, and yet its pattern is that of a catalogue Performance of comparisons followed, in the last six lines, by a set of Having recorded a poem in your memory is one thing. transcending contrasts. It avoids the logical unfolding of "If Playing what's been recorded is another. A perfectly played And. . . Then. . . Yes" so frequent in that mode. Compare it and recorded tape or CD can sound like a disaster on faulty with the arrangement in the sonnet of the catalogue of equipment handled ineptly. So with a memorized text. beautiful sights in Wordsworth's "Composed upon Performing a poem can mean any one of a number of things. Anyone who has heard a poetry reading cannot fail to might naturally do at the rhyme-word, "keep." But many observe that some poets read their work aloud very well enjambments are gentler and subtler than these, the line- indeed. They read the poems for their meaning, rather than break cutting into the syntax less violently, and you to express their personal presences: the "performance" in eventually learn to deal with these, only gently this case is more like that of a musician playing—and acknowledging by your tone and near-pause the interplay of thereby interpreting—a solo piano piece, say, than it is like line-end and sentence-flow at each point. what has gotten to be called "performance art" (a sword- swallower or fire-eater or stand-up comic). In reciting a Tone is particularly important in comical or light verse: poem aloud, you are not like an actor, coming to understand, too much underlining of what the lines themselves are and then to feel yourself in a dramatic part, a fictional clearly doing is like jabbing a finger in the shoulder of a person. It's rather that you come to understand, and then listener as you tell a joke to make him or her "get the to be, the voice of the poem itself. point." Less obvious but even more important can be the emotional and rhetorical "tone" of a dramatic lyric, like Several matters are crucial to a good playback of what Blake's "The Tyger," or a monologue, like Browning's "My your memory has stored. One of the first is that of voice Last Duchess"—in each case you have to decide who the itself. I've noticed that college and even graduate students speakers are, what they know or realize about what they're today, when asked to read aloud in class, mutter and saying, and so forth. The more you understand a poem and mumble rather than speaking out—or speaking up. see its complexities and depths, the more you will be able Doubtless, some of this can be attributed to a fear of to do when reading it aloud. sounding pompous, orotund, empty and phony, qualities associated with the loud and elaborated speechifying of As you recite a poem, you know how long it is, and how dubious politicians and preachers, or of simply shouting like long each section or part of it is. Your listeners—unable as the voice-overs on automobile commercials. But whatever silent readers do to glance down the page or riffle through its general or particular personal causes, this reticence has successive ones—may not. As in a musical performance, to be overcome, and a little practice will allow you to your reading, as well as acknowledging the section-breaks, project your voice, finding the right level without seeming will have to build toward its conclusion. And while a over-loud or shrill. Then comes intonation, the matter of melodramatic, grandiose, or corny ending is always the sound of making sense. It is through control of tone of unfortunate, it is still necessary to indicate with your voice voice—of pitch and stress—that we orally represent the in some way that the poem has come to an end. If the poem various ways in which short sentences or clauses, and long, ends wittily or pointedly, tying up its formal or narrative or periodic ones, perhaps stretching across many lines, can be conceptual loose ends in any way, you need do little to color understood. Contrastive stress is very important in this with your tone. If it fades away, as many lyrics do, you English— consider the difference between "this book, that may have to do a bit more. book" and "this book, that cup," and the way the italicization indicates which of the two syllables in each pair would be Hearing enough good recitation will enable you not stressed. Poems are full of invisibly italicized contrasts of only to memorize, but also to read other poetry with its this kind, and your reading should realize these. sound in your mental ear. Of later twentieth-century poets, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, W. S. Merwin, Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of and Thom Gunn are known for their abilities as outstanding enjambment. Obvious cases are those of, say, the lines from public readers of poetry, and any recordings of their Milton's sonnet "On His Blindness" quoted earlier. Or these readings will be valuable guides to the questions just from Keats's "To Autumn": "And sometimes like a gleaner discussed. And finally, in the case of any good poem, thou dost keep/Steady thy laden head across a brook"— remember the old proverb about thrift and the revision of where you would want to I override the line-break almost it by the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland: "Take care of the completely in your reading of it, instead of pausing as you sense and the sounds will take care of themselves."

WHERE TO FIND A POEM www.poets.org On poets.org, the complete essay of “Committed to Memory” by John Hollander www.poetryfoundation.org has lots of good choices: www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17111 www.writersalmanac.publicradio.org www.loc.gov/poetry (see Poetry 180) www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud www.bl.uk/collections

Below is a list of poets from which you can choose; if a poet you are interested in is not on this list, remember to get the final approval from your English teacher.

THE POET LIST Aiken, Conrad De La Mare, Walter Kunitz, Stanley Roethke, Theodore Ammons, A. R. Dickens, Charles Lamb, Charles Rossetti, Christina Angelou, Maya Dickinson, Emily Landon, Letitia Elizabeth Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Armitage, Simon Donne, John Landor, Walter Savage Sanchez, Sonia Arnold, Matthew Dove, Rita Lazarus, Emma Sandburg, Carl Ashbery, John Doyle, Dr. Arthur Conan Lear, Edward Sasson, Sigfried Auden, W. H. Dunbar, Paul Laurence Levertov, Denise Schuyler, James Baraka, Amiri Duncan, Robert Lincoln, Abraham Schwartz, Delmore Bang, Mary Jo Eliot, George Longfellow, Henry Shakespeare, William Barbauld, Anna Lætitia Eliot, T. S. Wadsworth Shelley, Percy Bysshe Berryman, John Ferlinghetti, Lawrence Lowell, Robert Sidney, Philip Bishop, Elizabeth Field, Michael Lowell, Amy Simic, Charles Blake, William Frost, Robert Marlowe, Christopher Snodgrass, W.D. Bly, Robert Ginsberg, Allen Maxwell, James Clerk Soto, Gary Bowles, William Lisle Giovanni, Nikki Meredith, George Spender, Stephen Bradstreet, Anne Gluck, Louise Merriam, Eve Spenser, Edmund Brontë, Anne Graves, Robert Merrill, James Stafford, William Brontë, Charlotte Hall, Donald Merwin, W. S. Stein, Gertrude Brontë, Emily Jane Hass, Robert Millay, Edna Saint-Vincent Stevens, Wallace Brook, Rupert Hayden, Robert Moodie, Susanna Stevenson, Robert Louis Brooks, Gwendolyn Heaney, Seamus Moore, Thomas Strand, Mark Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Holmes, Oliver Wendell Moore, Marianne Swinburne, A. C. Browning, Robert Hood, Thomas Notley, Alice Tennyson, Alfred Burns, Robert Hopkins, Gerard Manley Nye, Naomi Shihab Thomas, Dylan Byron, George Gordon Housman, A. E. O’Hara, Frank Twain, Mark Carlyle, Thomas Hughes, Langston Olds, Sharon Warren, Robert Penn Carroll, Lewis Hunt, Leigh Oliver, Mary Whitman, Walt Cary, Phoebe Jarrell, Randall Pastan, Linda Whittier, John Greenleaf Chin, Marilyn Jeffers, Robertson Patmore, Coventry Wilbur, Richard Cisneros, Sandra Jewett, Sophie Plath, Sylvia Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Clare, John Johnson, Samuel Poe, Edgar Allan Wilde, Oscar Clifton, Lucille Jonson, Ben Pope, Alexander Williams, William Carlos Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth Keats, John Pound, Ezra Wordsworth, William Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Kenyon, Jane Rector, Liam Wright, James Collins, Billy Kinnell, Galway Rexroth, Kenneth Wyatt, Thomas Cowper, William Kipling, Rudyard Rich, Adrienne Wylie, Elinor Crane, Hart Koch, Kenneth Riley, James Whitcomb Yeats, William Butler Creeley, Robert Kooser, Ted Robinson, Edwin Arlington Cummings, E. E. Komunyakaa, Yusef Robinson, Mary