Where Will Poetry Out Loud Go Next? — Some Positive Predictions

1.6.10 - Robert Oliphant - Did anyone actually predict Susan Boyle’s sudden rise to fame? Or did any professional educator predict the scale of Poetry Out Loud’s success? — especially its jump from 40,000 participants nationwide to 300,000 in four years.

Where Will Poetry Out Loud Go Next? — Some Positive Predictions

by Robert Oliphant

Did anyone actually predict Susan Boyle’s sudden rise to fame?  Or did any professional educator predict the scale of Poetry Out Loud’s success? —  especially its jump from 40,000 participants nationwide to 300,000 in four years.  Coming closer to home, since many of us, especially those concerned with K-8 students, may want to use the Poetry Out Loud approach on our own, let’s look at how this brilliant innovation works and how it might be put to use with different groups of learner-reciters.    

Texts. . . . As befits its sponsorship by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Out Loud (www.poetryoutloud.org)  offers an immense range of choice to teachers and students, i.e., over 600 individual poems, including a separate sub-listing  of over 200 manageable learning targets of no more than 25.  So as far as spelling and format go, the list is internationally authoritative, far more so than, say, Poems to Memorize, which “modernizes” Shakespeare (b. 1564) but retains the quaint memorization-unfriendly spellings of his younger contemporary John Donne (b. 1572). 

Practically considered, what Poetry Out Loud offers its participants is an easy-to-copy access list of established ready-to-memorize targets to choose from, along with biographical information on each poet.  To use a Chaucerian phrase, it’s as close to Goddes foyson (plenty) as any learner would want — including overseas Ameriphones (over three trillion now) that study and speak standard worldwide American pronunciation English (SWAPE).      

Time. . . . Memorizing takes time.  Hence the practicality of the Poetry Out Loud 25-line list for younger learners.  Its popularity level is underscored by the fact that 40 out of our “top fifty” poems (based on Grangers® data regarding anthology status) meet this 25-line requirement, and are also in public domain.  For learners, since poems vary in their number of lines, line measurements also work well for time-on-task estimates, i.e., ten minutes per line as a basic memorization figure.  

It’s true that this ten-minute estimate gives participants a daunting basis for respecting what lies ahead, e.g., 140 minutes to get preliminary mastery of a 14-line sonnet which in performance as a “moment’s monument” will require only 60 seconds.  But the estimate also opens the tortoise-friendly door for less verbally agile students to compete successfully by using their most productive resource — extra learning time.

Tests. . . . Poetry Out Loud’s ultimate test is the  frightening ordeal of up front public performance, which goes far beyond accurate recollection, spoken or written, to embrace the arts of the orator and the actor.  Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan were eloquent performers of poetry, for example, and so was the great French actress, Sarah Bernhardt, who won her first important audition by dramatically reciting the French national anthem.  In an actual program, though, the memorization element is a confidence builder, and so is the gentle progress from classroom interaction to higher level competition.

Our emphasis upon recitation as a primary goal raises serious questions regarding first-step suggestions like “Read the poem aloud.”  As opposed to preparation for a poetry “reading,” even an informal recitation-performance requires a first step far more on the order of  “Examine the poem’s line-by-line structure.”  Comprehension first, then the memorization, and only then the almost endless rehearsals for a spoken and nuanced public triumph — especially in the sense of a major personal challenge met and mastered.

The beauty of structural comprehension is that it opens the door to both self testing and large group multiple choice testing.  Even after one silent reading of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods,” most of us can recall in sequence the words which close the first four lines, namely, KNOW, THOUGH, HERE, and (what else?) SNOW.  With a little more study, we can also answer questions phrased solely in terms of relative location, e.g., Please identify the word in your chosen poem which appears immediately before its second “line closer” word.  If your chosen poem is “Stopping by Woods,” your answer would be VILLAGE. 

If your chosen poem is “Trees,” on the other hand, your answer would be A (from “as a tree”).  Both of these single-letter answers, incidentally can be represented by machine-scored multiple choice alternatives, e.g., a, e, i, o, or “none of these.”  Measurable levels of line-learning difficulty and machine-scored tests — these features will open the door for the Poetry Out Load vision to work its magic in many new settings as an encouraging first step toward public recitation.  Personal best confidence building, too.

Productivity. . . . From the perspective of society and its leaders, the social productivity of time spent in memorizing poems can best be summed up by invoking Daniel Bell’s term “psychological mobility,” which is to say that a functioning society needs citizens who collectively comprehend what is meant by words when used in the context of specific sentences, not just a vocabulary test.

Hence the need for all of us to understand figurative language (metaphor and metonymy), especially when common sense social awareness is officially tested by questions like “What does the expression Two heads are better than one mean to you?   Hence also our concern (frustration, too) regarding exactly how to explain what the “right” answer is for questions like these, especially for an older person being diagnosed for senile dementia.

Our most authoritative source of answers to such questions are the actual sentence-phrase examples dictionaries use (e.g., Random House Unabridged) to illustrate specific definitions, as in the question, “In which of the following dictionary definitions of HEAD does the phrase wise heads; crowned head actually appear? — (a) “a person considered with reference to his or her mind, disposition, attributes, status, etc”. . . . (b) “the head considered as the center of the intellect, as of thought, memory, understanding, or emotional control; mind; brain”. . . . (c) “the maturated part of an abscess, boil, etc.  [dictionary-based answer: (a)] 

Right now, as many Americans know from direct experience, over a million of us encounter casually chosen  diagnostic questions like our “two heads” example.  Consequently, given the importance of figurative awareness as a mainstream social survival skill, we can expect future versions of Poetry Out Loud to include senior citizens as participants seeking new challenges and new hope in facing the cognitive hazards of aging — especially in the absence of authoritative professional alternatives.

Personal confidence. . . . The mega-increase in Poetry Out Loud participation owes a great deal to its sixfold increase in poems to choose from, including, a strong emphasis upon poets who are still living and creating.  As we’ve seen, this new emphasis upon more alternatives for personal-choice learning has clearly increased the number of participants.  Even more important, though, it has transformed what was originally a win-lose competition into a personal-best confidence builder.  Emotionally at least, this kind of poetry challenge is far more analogous to a local biathlon (biking and running) than to winner-take-all competitions like the Scripps National Spelling Bee. 

Given American education’s emphasis upon competition, sometimes with a stacked deck, I feel we can expect to see many derivative versions of Poetry Out Loud in the next few years.  Grades one through eight is the most logical locale, of course.  But many of us, I’m sure, can imagine poetry recitation spinoffs for Alzheimer’s-fearful senior citizens, and special education students, along with  “mentathlons” that require a short, closing recitation requirement for each biathlon competitor.  Call it Poetry Out Loud Redux or “Personal Best Cognitive Empowerment” — I believe many Americans will respect and support this new perspective and its challenges.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . From a practical perspective (that’s what Americans want most, don’t they?) I want to express my indebtedness to the new field of “metrology,” (cf. the relabeling of “Weights and Measures” in states like California and Oregon as “Measurement Standards”).  Looking forward, I have high hopes that professional metrologists will respect innovative programs based on Poetry Out Loud as having both an “authoritative” standard (i.e., an “official” text) and a measurement system that is “calibrated” (i.e., identifies different levels of difficulty and achievement).

Though not explicitly mathematical, the arts of poetry are far more quantitative than those of prose. cf. Pope’s “I lisped in numbers for the numbers came.”  Even W. Edwards Deming, who worked out a more singable version of the Star Spangled Banner, and his TQM followers would probably approve the direction in which our Poetry Out Loud vision may take us.

***

Appendix: Poetry and Personal Confidence . . . . By way of pursuing the personal confidence theme more vigorously, I’m appending an announcement that some of our local health clubs may well be running a couple of years from now. 

Dear Member. . . .  Welcome to our equipment and our trainers.  If you want to lose weight, though, we strongly recommend that you (a) check out the Poetry Out Loud web site (www.poetryoutloud.org), (b) choose 3 poems, memorize them, and then recite them to at least five people as a confidence builder, and (c) come back and start work with a much higher chance (at least 300%) of success and personal satisfaction. . . .Though Hard Work is the name of our weight loss game, it’s your own personal confidence that brings you here, and will help you to achieve your goals  — energetically and productively!