OGIC’s lovely meditation on the benefits of memorizing poetry provokes Maud to recall the memorized bits in her own head. (How much do I love the image of Maud sitting on the train reciting Corinthians woefully to herself?) I’m sure you’ve already read both posts, but if not, I highly recommend you do.

A sad, shabby truth about me: I can’t tell if poetry scans. Truly. This presented a bit of a problem in college as I was, um, training to be a poet. I could wing a certain amount (believe me, there is plenty about myself that fills me with self-loathing, but I have to say I’m a glorious winger) — still, I knew at some point ahead, in some graduate seminar, the fraud was going to be revealed. It was a little like showing up day after day for a gig at the symphony without the ability to read music, just a rough ability to saw on your violin.

The worst part is that I’ve had scansion explained to me — many times, by several good teachers and professors and helpful friends. And as these people were explaining it to me, I’d experience a glimmering of understanding that would extinguish as soon as I went back to reading the poem by myself. Yet there comes a point where it becomes too embarrassing not to get what is for everyone else in the room clearly self-evident, and so I stopped asking. I would sit in class looking at a Ben Jonson poem, listening to other people comment about the beats, and I could not figure out where the stresses were. It seemed to me that you could put the emphasis anywhere, and the more I looked at the poem, the more panicked I would become, till the poem read to me like a steady stomping of feet. I weighted each syllable with rocks: And, if, to, for, whatever. At parties I would stand in the corner and talk defiantly about the beauty of so-and-so’s free verse.

Yet during my education there were certain moments when the clouds lifted and I could hear what everyone else heard. One of those times was hearing Robert Pinsky recite Robert Frost’s “To Earthward”:

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things
The flow of– was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass or sand,

The hurt is not enough.
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

After class I quasi-memorized the poem hoping that having it by heart would help me know scanning wherever I met it. It half helps, sometimes I can hear scansion now, other times not so much. But that, to me, seems part of the worth of memorizing and reciting poetry: It helps you intuitively learn what poetry does in ways that bare-faced explanations can’t.

Incidentally, it was that same seminar with Pinsky that made me switch from poetry to fiction, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. I was thinking of it the other day when Maud mentioned her college poem about the moldy tangerine. For workshop, I turned in a poem that I will not give you in its full awfulness, except to say that it figured a madwoman, a moon, a broken egg, and frequent allusions to Jane Eyre, which should tell you enough. My classmates were (rightfully) tearing it up and Pinsky said, “I don’t know … there’s a strange intensity here,” with his eyes half-closed like he was looking at a really peculiar specimen through a microscope. And then he was silent. And then we moved on to the next person’s poem.