Dig and Be Dug

If you had told me back when I started teaching full time, almost ten years ago, that I would be in a room with 200 teachers screaming--screaming, I tell you--over poetry--yes, poetry; that fellow students reciting poetry would trigger an ear-splitting demonstration of enthusiasm, I would ask for a sample of whatever you were ingesting.

It happened last Friday, April 27, at American History High.  We held what we called a Poetry Slam (although it was not truly a Slam, particularly as it was non-competitive) in our main auditorium (well, "cafetorium" actually), with 20 poets from our Public Speaking classes and an audience of mostly juniors and seniors.  The subjects covered everything on students' minds -- love, violence, drugs, identity, pregnancy, broken families, broken friendships, beauty, truth, all that good poetry-type stuff.

I don't deserve much credit for this.  My students live in a world with few tools for them to combat their circumstances.  They have been brought up to understand how important words are and what they can do.  History has taught them the jiu jitsu of using the words of our Founding Fathers to achieve goals that those long-ago limited men could never have dreamed of.  They see doors opened and walls collapsed with words.  We are a nation based on an idea and a promise rooted in that idea, so that for all the tanks and bombs and mighty mountains and amber waves of grain, our true nationhood is one of words.

And they love their new word-tools.  I learned this year to stop fighting the phones and use my own jiu-jitsu and incorporate them.  My wife talks about being in the Look It Up Club back in her school days.  Now every student with a smart phone can be part of that club.  And if they don't have one, their friend they sit with probably does.  If I don't give them something to do with those phones, they'll be texting.  Think about that -- they'll be writing.  Once our predecessors bemoaned the advent of cheap telephone service as the herald of the end of writing.  Now young people can't stop writing; texting, IM'ing, blogging, even e-mailing (although that is very old-fashioned).  As long as it isn't official, approved or assigned, they will do that writing.

Not to mention that students today have grown up entirely in the age of rap, in which the most talented rhymers are raking in seven-figure incomes, a fact that must be making Robert Browning and John Keats absolutely furious in their graves, thinking of the bucks they coulda scored in their day.  (Robert Burns even wrote pop tunes!)

So perhaps it was predictable, that students would go wild for the wordsmiths, who stir sound and sense into a new Newark gumbo all our own.  Special props, however, to one of our most gifted performers in the school, who capped his poetry recitation, with a walk down the auditorium aisle, flower in hand, to ask his long-time squeeze to the prom.

The explosion in the room for that exquisite romantic gesture -- well, there are no words.

Lecturing and teaching

I first saw Professor Michael Sendel of Harvard talking about his book Justice: What's The Right Thing to Do? on The Colbert Report and immediately sought it out. It's a very readable, straightforward, unfootnoted primer on Political Philosophy built on an inquiry into ideas of justice, morality and ethics.

Then I discovered that the course from which this book arose had been recorded for broadcast on PBS and was available on disc and online. In fact, here's the first episode (warning - it's 54 minutes long and there is a good chance you will be fascinated and unable to stop watching):



Now you can paint me blue and call me a Buick, but I don't think any of that is beyond a reasonably accomplished high school senior. (I believe Professor Sendel's course is for freshmen -- they sure talk like freshmen.) And if I had the chance, I would love to build a course on the use of these lectures (they are divvied up into discrete 24 or 25 minute segments), using my own classroom as the seminar-discussion portion of the class between lectures, just like in college. It would be a nice foretaste of college procedure, and these are issues and ideas that automatically engage any young person. In fact, these are the issues that any thoughtful young person MUST reflect on as they are becoming who they will be.

But that's beside my point in making this post. What's really interesting, beside Dr. Sendel's clear and simple explication of the ideas and analysis of the writers and questions considered, is a good illustration of the difference between writing a book and teaching a course. As I said, the book Justice is ultra-clear and ultra-simple to read. I think I even almost understand Kant's categorical imperative, at least if I stand very, very still and don't look at any flashing lights or kitties or anything.

But oddly, it is almost too clear, too smooth. It goes very fast and ideas rush at the reader very quickly. It's probably not a good idea to sit down and read the book straight through, but to stop and reflect for a while between each chapter. But when you watch Professor Sendel teach virtually the same material it doesn't rush at you the same way. We can see him "feel the room," engage in dialogue with the students, incorporate what he needs, deflect what he doesn't, and yet make every student there feel included in the conversation. Because oddly enough, while he is teaching in the most regressive and (research tells us) ineffectual mode available, yet he is effective and his ideas land and stick and leave a residue in your mind after the video is over.

Of course, when you're actually at Harvard you have a week or so between lectures to absorb what Sendel has said, to read the material for the next class, to find the holes in his arguments and to prepare questions about how it all fits together. But even without that, the videos are more effective than the very fine book. I would summarize the difference as teaching.

It all put me in mind of another series of lectures recorded at Harvard back in 1973, when Leonard Bernstein occupied the Norton Chair for Poetry and conducted six very lengthy lectures -- the longest was just shy of three hours -- on the direction of concert music. In fact, the whole thing was a defense of diatonic harmony which had been on the wane for the previous 60 years or so, but which turned around and defeated non-tonal music within a decade of his lectures, especially in the work of Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich. And oddly enough, Bernstein built his argument on linguistic theory, justifying the whole series as a matter of poetics, which was what the endowment was supposed to be for. (But really, who would have hassled Bernstein if he had wanted to show home movies of his dog for 102 minutes?)

Again, the lectures were published as a book, but the book is really missing something. What they're missing is both Bernstein's pedagogical skills and the force of his personality. Which are inseparable, as they are with the charming, though less histrionic Professor Sendel.

Here's a short excerpt explicating Bernstein's central conceit:



Fun, huh? And you don't even have to know anything about music to engage with his ideas. You don't have to agree, but you almost HAVE to respond.

What makes this work, what makes old-fashioned lecturing appropriate for both Bernstein and Sendel is that they are not simply delivering information you could get from a book or a website. They are conducting an inquiry and constructing an argument; engaging in the fine art of persuasion. And to do that effectively, you must bring the power of human personality to bear, provided you have one.

Aw, the heck with it. Here's the entire first lecture by Bernstein, if you've got an hour and three-quarters to burn. It's really worth it.



All of the Sendel course is available on YouTube, and here, where there are supplemental materials. And all of Bernstein's Unanswered Question lectures are on YouTube, absolutely free. (The DVDs cost hundreds.) Isn't this a great age we live in?

And if your school IT guy still is blocking YouTube, show your principal this and start knocking some heads together. Don't take any guff.

Infusing Poetry into Language Arts Instruction III

Continuing my long slow series on integrating poetry into an overall language arts program, which I began with my anti-Poetry Month post, I urge you and your students to create personal anthologies of poetry and verse to intensify your personal relationship with poetic expression that is of real personal meaning.

If you're reading this, you're probably a savvy teacher and you don't need me laying out all the specifications of the project. I simply want to share what I've learned about doing such an assignment, based on what I think it should accomplish, as contrasted with what usually happens in most high school and middle school English classes.

First and foremost, as I've been trying to emphasize in all of my posts on this topic, poetry should be an all-year, every-week topic, not an isolated unit hastily scrabbled together toward the end of the year. ("Poems are short -- the students are tired...") Do not shuffle it off to a sideshow, or it will become a meaningless waste of time. Poetry works on the mind and the soul incrementally. It needs time and prolonged exposure to work its magic and it does not demand those the way a novel does. So it is up to you to provide those.

So first of all, your anthology project is too small and too short. I see teachers assigning 8 or 10 poems. I can scoop that many up in less than half an hour. I would suggest no fewer than 40 poems -- about one per week for the year, and even that it is a bit cautious for my tastes. It's really easy to find poems one likes.

Second, the poems must be hand-written in the anthology. I know how to cut and paste, so I expect my students have figured that out, too. And cut-and-pasted material is rarely read. To write a poem out by hand is to have a personal physical relationship to it. Quite a palpable physical relationship, for that matter, because one has to plan the use of the available space -- if a line has to be split, or a poem stretches over more than one page. Every word that passes through the pen has passed through the mind, and as many actors and public speakers know, the act of writing something down aids the memory.

Which brings up the next point. You MUST assign memorization. A lot of teachers are shying away from this, either from fear of student opposition, which is fierce on this point lately; and also from a sincere conviction (which I share to some degree) that in the era of easy access to information, memorization is a less important skill. This is certainly true of known and static facts. But there are still things we need to carry in our heads, such as diagnostic information or procedures to accomplish things.

And there is a special relationship between a person and a poem he or she has memorized. If you have any doubt about that, look at this video:



Some grammar school teacher of blessed memory made her students memorize something, and not just anything, but in this case, one of the richest verses in the English language, and that memory provided sustenance in a time of trial, and has remained with him his entire life.

If you really want to see how someone can live completely infused with poetry, see The History Boys. Wouldn't it nice to always have poetry at your mental fingertips for every situation?

Back to the anthology project. The memorized poem really shouldn't be the only one all year. You should do it at least once per quarter and give your students detailed, kind critiques which can help them develop and improve in the aural presentation of verse. Nobody learns much from anything they only do once, or even only occasionally.

All the usual specifications should apply to your anthology project. Have them illustrate and decorate the books, be sure they write a personal reflection of a reasonable length for each verse, and, given that your project will stretch over many months, there should be periodic progress check-ups. You may want to have the students select a theme or some other organizing principle, so that the anthology is less general and perhaps scattered. But you know how to do all that.

I just ask that you stop segregating poetry from the rest of language arts and let it out of its box to play with all the other literary forms - essay, short story, journalism, dramatic work AND full-length fiction, and see what it contributes to the general conversation. I think you'll be happily surprised.

Infusing Poetry in Language Arts instruction Part II

This began with my post urging English teachers NOT to celebrate National Poetry Month in April, because that shunts poetry into a calendar-bound ghetto, whereas poetry should be freely roaming around your curriculum, lurking behind every pedagogical corner.

One of your obstacles will be the general resistance to poetry, or, to be more precise, to the way poetry was taught to your students in the lower grades. Too much emphasis was put on rhyme and other technical matters, and the subject matter tended toward nature and other harmless warm and fuzzy topics. It would be surprising to find an elementary school teacher presenting students with poetry that talked to where they really live.

Slam poetry is all about where we really live here and now. It is not interested in posterity. It is literally of the moment, of the moment it is being performed. Even now, into its second decade, there are not a great number of printed anthologies of slam poetry, any more than there are books of rap lyrics. Slam is primarily an aural medium, meant to be experienced, which brings the focus back to the aspect of poetry most greatly neglected in the 20th century. Poetry had become reflexive, self-referential and driven by academia. (The exception in the United States, were the new Black and Latino writers creating a poetry of the streets, designed to be shouted and chanted from the pavement up toward the sealed windows of the people who run things.)

Slam, on the other hand, was born and bred in a barroom and the critics are not academics, but audience members selected at random and given no criterion. The pressure is on for the slam poet to reach the listener immediately and have them like what they hear. Frank Loesser described song lyrics as being written on the side of a train which the audience has once chance to read as it goes by. So it is with Slam. No chance to reflect on the reference to Baudelaire and the significance of post-modernism. Get it now and it goes.

Simply put it, you must understand it -- at least some if not most of it -- on first hearing. This will appeal to your students. Also, it must have a performance rhythm and audience appeal; typically, this is the long upward build to a climax with a denouement, perhaps witty, wry or touching. Performance requires poetry to take a narrative shape, even if the purpose is not storytelling but reflection on a subject -- that narrative shape asserts itself in nearly all oral presentation.

And in New Jersey, and probably your state as well, oral presentation is part of your core curriculum. So forget about making it optional. All students must get up and slam. I leave it to you as to whether you require memorization, they all must speak before the others, learn how to speak clearly and evenly, to emphasize what is important, to vary the speed and the pitch of their speech. I know a lot of them will fight you on it, but it is teaching abuse to leave your students unequipped and afraid of public speaking. I've backed off in this area before for fear of traumatizing children, but I believe that was a mistake. Like other times and places when you must move your students out of their comfort zone, you can't bully and threaten them on this. You must persuade and cajole and coax. But you must insist and be firm. (My thought about memorization is to announce that it will be required, then let them use the paper on the day itself. This provides the benefits of both thorough and complete preparation of the text with relaxation and security during delivery which allows them to focus on the quality of what they are doing rather than the brute effort of recitation from memory.)

And there is the competition factor. My first principal, who is a superb teacher, was always skittish around competition and its negative aspects, which I need hardly recite here. But I believe that many of those negatives are mitigated here, as there is no built-in advantage for the brainiacs or the jocks in this competition. Most years there is at least one or two surprises as to who will excel at slamming. But one of the great values of competition is that it is its own intrinsic motivation. I rarely, if ever, offer prizes in classroom competitions. Pride of success is sufficient. Most young people cannot avoid wanting to compete any more than my cat can avoid jumping on a shiny thing that is moving. Some kind of atavistic impulse kicks in and, provided that they each believe they can be basically competent, they will try to do well at slam.

Getting them to a confidence about basic competence will take some time. Months, probably. You need to start adding the writing of poetry onto other writing assignments right away at the beginning of the school year. Have them add a poetic reflection to their five-paragraph essays. Have them do their classroom warm-up as poetry. Most of all, break the doggerel habit. Too many children are swamped by the tyranny of rhyme and meter and their expressive instincts have been completely suppressed. Find organizing principles other than rhyme, such as repetition, anaphora, antistrophe, alternation of long and short phrases, controlling metaphor and the like. Most of all, get them to write and not worry about the process and the devices much.

A side benefit of writing poetry -- by having to break thoughts and stories into lines and stanzas, they will gradually fall away from turning in prose in one single unbroken paragraph. Personally, I find unparagraphed so literally physically difficult to read, that I will hand such papers back and demand they be resubmitted with some divisions. Again, teaching in the lower grades has damaged them a great deal, and they thrash around fearing they have no topic sentences and that not all the sentences will support that, and generally write as if the chief end of writing was to be able to be outlined easily. As you can see by my style in this blog, I think this is hooey. The chief end of writing is, obviously, communication of (1) emotion; and (2) ideas. (3) Information is OK, but it is a lower order of writing, valuable to know but not aspirational.

How you organize your competition, your teams, selecting judges, involving other classes or other faculty, you are a far better judge than I. I can no more engineer your methodology than you mine. I am just here to be a cheerleader. But make sure that it is fun, that it is competitive, that is emphatic, that is strong, that it is real and true.

And this is authentic learning, in that slam competitions are going on each and every weekend, if not each night of the week, all across this country. As far as introducing your students to the ethos of slam, there are a number of videos on YouTube you could cull. Here's one example:



I would also suggest the very selective use of HBO's Def Poetry Jam -- but you MUST preview this, because unobjectionable material alternates in rapid sequence with very adult themes. I like to use excerpts from a documentary feature SlamNation which although more than a decade old and with some technical lapses, shows a lot of the great early stars of the medium (Taylor Mali, Saul Williams, Beau Sia), and presents the heat of battle well. And the film has a bleeped school-appropriate edition which can be ordered here. Another resource is the Russell Simmons miniseries Brave New Voices, which is too long for classroom use, but excerpts from which can be used to show actual high school students preparing for competition.

All of this is to prove that poetry is not for the faint of heart. It's not just for flowers and clouds and unicorns and rainbows. Although maybe it is for rainbows, because it is a powerful medium for all the colors of your classroom to be heard.

Integrating poetry into Language Arts Part I

At the outset, I need to be clear about two things. (1) I don't know much about poetry, and even less about the poetic literature. Of the great 18th and 19th century English poets I am almost completely ignorant; and (2) I don't care.

I have always approached teaching English as a discipline of skills (which is why I prefer the name "Language Arts.") I have no special brief for literature over all the other modes of writing. I want my students to build their toolkits as readers and writers, and I don't care much where and how they acquire their tools, so long as they work well. For instance, if you want to borrow from math and use a Venn diagram to teach metaphors, why not?

So from poetry, I'm not as interested in the sheer art of poetry as the craft elements which can contribute to the student's general literacy. To begin with, one of the greatest values poetry brings to writing in general is precision and economy. In a short piece of writing, such as ultra-short story, a song lyric or a poem, every word must be working hard to perform its task and contribute to the entire effect of the piece. Hence the challenge and fun of Hemingway's six word novels, for example:

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn
Playing pool was just an excuse.
I finally realized he loved guacamole.
Said I'd never marry again. Damn.
My secret discovered. Plane ticket purchased.
Two lives, one day. Never again.
He woke to an empty house.
Lost her sweater. Kept his jacket.
Heaven can't. Hell won't. Now what?
Wrong day for the scenic route.
Found true love, married someone else.
Hey Stranger, coffee's on, sit awhile.

So one approach might be to pack and unpack some especially pithy poems or portions thereof.

"So much depends/upon a red wheelbarrow"
"Do not go gentle into that good night"
"I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference"
"I have measured my life out with coffee spoons"
"I held a Jewel in my fingers--/And went to sleep"
"yes is a pleasant country"

(Note - Shakespeare is not useful for this exercise, because he generally seems to unpack his own metaphors and images. As the experienced reader and playgoer will testify, Shakespeare always strives for utmost clarity, and eschews enigma.)

So for example, the "unpacked" version "I have measured my life out with coffee spoons" might be, "My life has become so dull and routine, that each day is like another as each mound of coffee in the spoon is like another." Or, "Another day, another pot of coffee, nothing happening but drinking cups of coffee, day after day." Or, "I keep spooning out my days like coffee until they will all be gone, like the coffee in the jar." Or some combination of all of these. None of these interpretations are all right or all wrong, but they are all contained, all "packed" into those few words, like a huge database packed into a Zip file.

The final exercise might be to take a short story or passage and condense it down into stages. First an abridged version of itself, then perhaps a list of salient points or events, then a poem, then a critical line or two of the poem. This task is best done collaboratively. What you end up with might be banal: Hamlet condensed might be: "Revenge is folly." But that's not important--what matters is what the student experiences or learns in the process of winnowing down the large to the small.

And that, ultimately, is the lesson of poetry -- that which is large contained, encompassed, suggested in that which is small.

Don't celebrate National Poetry Month

Those "Special Months" - Black History Month, Poetry Month, National Widget Month - are a tempting trap for a teacher. Focus on this topic or area for this specified period of time and it will be "covered." It's a little frightening how many English teachers I talk to who freely admit not knowing much about poetry and/or not really liking it.

First of all, not knowing about something is NEVER an excuse not to teach it. It is an invitation to learn more. From my own experience, the most exciting things to teach are the things you are learning at the moment you are teaching. Much better than the stuff you've known for ages and ages. I didn't know much about poetry when I started teaching it, but I think I know something about good writing and bad writing and the difference. The trick is not to be sucked into the craft issues around verse which can smother an appreciation for poetry. If you're teaching English, you should have developed some personal taste, and that's all you really need. Teach what you respond to and/or what you believe your students will respond to.

The idea is NOT to teach "all about poetry." It's to teach poetry. I face this problem in general music courses all the time. Students come in at the beginning of the year with all sorts of facts about how many children Bach had and how old Mozart was when he died, but trivia about the lives of musicians is not music. Similarly, English teachers sink into a swamp of Robert Frost's New England roots, the use of anaphora and how a triolet is put together without ever developing a taste for poetry, either in themselves or in their students.

You know, like this:



In fact, these analytic habits are so ingrained that your students may assist you in killing poetry, like this:



And so poetry becomes a "unit," which is defined as "something we have to work on right now but soon you will be able to forget completely." To read and write poems for one month in an academic year is like only listening to music in the fall. If poetry is going to get under your skin and that of your students, you need to make it part of your routine, at least on a weekly or perhaps biweekly basis -- but no less frequent than that.

WHY should you care about poetry? Your students just need to be able to pass the HSPAs, write a resume and a college essay. They're never going to "need" this. If that's how you feel, stop, step back and remember that you are teaching literacy. Language and its uses. And poetry is language at its most assertive and vigorous, doing what only words can do. It's the same reasons you don't teach art by looking at book illustrations or teach music by studying Muzak. Most of the time we put language to work serving some other master -- typically, persuasion or narrative. (Both of those tasks can be performed by other means.) But poetry is lacuna pro lacuna, words on display, leaping and pirouetting as only they can do.

Step One: Find a whole bunch of poems YOU LIKE that you can explicate with energy and enthusiasm.

Where to look? Here's a few suggestions:

Poetry 180 A poem a day for high school students and teachers at this website created by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. There are two versions of this collection in book form, if you're still attached to those old-fashioned things.

A note about anthologies - you can always look at the big ones, the Norton and the Oxford being the best. But they are rather anonymous and extremely over-inclusive, and you will have to slog through or pass over a lot of poems that mean nothing to you to find one that does. My advice is to find an editor you are comfortable with, or at least understand their point of view, and see what kind of poems they like.

She Walks in Beauty by Caroline Kennedy, an anthology organized around the stages of a woman's life.

Good Poems by Garrison Keillor. There's a no-frills title for you. It's based on a daily radio feature, so you can be sure these poems are good for reading aloud to people who don't go to poetry readings. Read Keillor's preface about poems that are clear, direct and communicative, rather than dense and literary.

An Invitation to Poetry The third volume of the "Favorite Poem Project," which are poems selected by actual humans (not college professors or literary critics) because they are significant to those people. I like this third volume for the classroom, because it comes with a DVD of 27 different people talking about their poems and their lives and reading or reciting the poems aloud. Many of these videos can be seen online at the link above, too.

Editor Robert Pinsky also has a fine collection, Essential pleasures: a new anthology of poems to read aloud, which is a great place to start looking for poems to commit to and recite from memory. I've written before about the virtues of memorizing of poetry, and I am making a resolution to learn a new poem by heart each month, as a challenge to my students.

(If you respond to poetry that's over 90 years old and out of copyright, you can check out this list of public domain anthologies on Bartleby.com. And of course there is a lot of poetry online, so you can simply follow your nose - but that can be very time-consuming.)

Step Two: Learn how to SAY the poem. Not read it, because if a poem is still a thing on a page to you, that's what it will be to your students. You don't have to memorize it, but you should know it well enough to spend most of your time speaking making eye contact with your students. Here's a poem I like to start the school year with, performed by its author, Taylor Mali:



I like this one because it not only notifies students what I expect of them (keep an open mind) but lets them know that I have aspirations and feelings as their teacher, that their progress means something to me.

Step Three: Repeat. Repeat regularly. You'll get better at this, if you only just start by presenting a poem you really like, opening up an issue or two or three that the students can talk about -- that is, be sure it's interactive and not just a performance by you. Don't worry about filling up a period. A few minutes at the start of one class each week would be awesome, as long as it's regular.

The advent of Taylor Mali raises the topic of Slam Poetry, which deserves its own post, especially in terms of incorporating slam into a regular middle school or high school English course, as contrasted with starting a club or a special group. But since I raised the subject, there are a couple of good anthologies and descriptions of the slam phenomenon, Poetry Slam by Gary Glezner and The Spoken Word Revolution by Mark Eleveld.

And I need to write yet another post on the use of writing poetry in a regular course. But I will tell you this from experience: Do not allow them to use rhyme at all for the first half-dozen assignments. Students will disappear down the hole of doggerel. They get obsessed with rhyming and, unless they are skilled and experienced, will not give you anything from the heart or the head, but just string together rhymes and syllables of padding in between. But I do recommend using poetry as a way of teaching ALL KINDS of writing. It teaches students to be economical, visual and precise. More of that another time.

And one MORE additional post I need to write. You need to assign students AND yourself to create an anthology over the school year. I highly recommend creating a class-wide wiki. But that's for another time. Soon, I promise.

So forget Poetry Month. My students know I celebrate Poetry Tuesday. If it's not regular and repeated, it's just "extra" and you will communicate the message that poetry *doesn't count.* And frankly folks, if you are an English teacher and you don't have anything to say or teach about poetry, you might be in the wrong line of work.

Feels like poetry

Received this via a Facebook friend.

To live with literature

At the end of the recent post-apocalyptic disaster movie, The Book of Eli ***SPOILER ALERT***, a character who has been known to be carrying the above-described book turns out to be carrying it in his head, to be recited and copied down. In like fashion, the library that survives the anti-book regime of Fahrenheit 451 consists of refugees in the woods who have memorized entire books and indeed have "become" the books they carry.

In our haste to overtone generations of rote learning we have thrown at least one baby out with the bathwater, namely the virtue of memorizing and reciting literature. We used to say we "learned it by heart," and truer words were never spoken. A poem we know from memory is one step closer to piercing our hearts with its beauty and truth.

Back when I wrote about great teachers in the movies, I can't believe I forgot the teachers, especially Hector, in Alan Bennett's play (and movie) The History Boys. Hector is not a wholly admirable character (nor is he meant to be), but he has a remarkable facility and command of poetry, summoning it on the instant to illustrate or illumine each points he makes. Some critics say his choices are less than perfect, but for heaven's sake, how many of us have enough of a repertory of poetry in our head than we can always call up le vers juste at all times. Heck, I've been teaching them for years, and I don't think I could get all the way through either Sonnet 29 or 116. But Hector can cough up Coleridge or Keats at the drop of a platitude.

I profess to love poetry, but I don't live with it and in it the way I would wish. I suppose that should be a resolution this year. After all, if the young man in the video below can recite "Litany" by Billy Collins with such clarity, expression, and above all, delight, can't my students and I be expected to do at least as well?