15 February 2006
By Heart
Carol Muske-Dukes (r, above ), Creative Writing Program
University of Southern California
Dearing W. Johns (l, above ), M.D., Department of Internal Medicine
Cardiovascular Division, UVA
Award winning poet Carol Muske-Dukes has written with eloquence (Sparrow , 2003) about the sudden death of her husband, actor David Dukes, and her subsequent mourning for her lost partner and their life together. Her presentation explores love, grief, the marriage of two artists, and the fragility of life itself.
Following is an Op-Ed Essay written by Ms. Dukes on the subject of poetry, for The New York Times, which she read during her Medical Center Hour program:
“A Lost Eloquence”
by Carol Muske-Dukes
The poem in my head goes something like this: Sunset and evening star / And one clear call for me! / O Captain my Captain! / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers / I’m nobody!Who are you?
These fragments were put there by my mother, who can recite, by heart, pages and pages of verse by Tennyson, Milton, Wordsworth, Longfellow and Dickinson. On occasion, I can manage to recite the poems that contribute to my voice-over poem in their entirety. My mother—whose voice (like the sound of waves, a kind of sea of words) is one of my earliest memories, my first sense of consciousness and language—gave me this gift.
She is 85, a member of perhaps the last generation of Americans who learned poems and orations by rote in classes dedicated to the art of elocution. This long-ago discredited pedagogical tradition generated a commonplace eloquence among ordinary Americans who knew how to (as they put it) “quote.” Poems are still memorized in some classrooms but not “put to heart” in a way that would prompt this more quotidian public expression.
Thus my mother, who grew up on the prairie of
For those who love poetry, the recent announcement that Ruth Lilly had donated about $100 million to Poetry magazine was a welcome boost. But to me the most illuminating aspect of this extraordinary news was not the size of the gift, but rather a subsequent revelation that the journal gets roughly 90,000 submissions a year—yet its circulation peaks at just 10,000. Literary magazine editors have pondered this kind of awkward imbalance for some time. It seems there are a lot of would-be poets out there. But it seems that many are writers who write without reading. And the power of reciting in order to share a poem or to comfort oneself with its words, seems almost unknown.
Years ago, when I taught in the graduate program in writing at Columbia, the late Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was also on the faculty. Brodsky famously infuriated the students in his workshop on the first day of class, when he would announce that each student would be expected to memorize several poems (some lengthy) and recite them aloud. The students—even if they had known that Brodsky had learned English in dissenter’s exile in
There was talk among students of refusing to comply with this requirement. Then they began to recite the poems learned by heart in class—and out of class. By the end of the term, students were “speaking” the poems of Auden and Bishop and Keats and Wyatt with dramatic authority and real enjoyment. Something had happened to change their minds. The poems they’d learned were now in their blood, beating with their hearts.
In the workshops I teach I continue to ask students to choose poems to memorize. Recently, a young woman loudly resisted what she called a boring exercise. But after memorizing Emily Dickinson, Countee Cullen, Sylvia Plath and several haiku by Issa, she was still going strong—delighted with how the words rolled trippingly off her tongue. “I own these poems now,” she said. (When I ask students early in the semester if they know a poem by heart, I usually hear the names Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss and occasionally Robert Frost. They often say that they can’t memorize long poems, but then I ask them if they know the lyrics of “Gilligan’s
Lately I’ve been dropping in at a local preschool and have been reminded how much even little children love to memorize poems. They absorbed rather effortlessly Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Swing” (How do you like to go up in a swing? / Up in the air so blue?), accompanied by gliding hand and body movements. They loved the repetition, the chiming of the words and images.
My mother taught me this poem as she pushed me on a swing in our backyard in
Originally published in The New York Times,
Carol Muske-Dukes is author of seven books of poetry, most recently Sparrow, Random House, 2003, and An Octave Above Thunder, New & Selected Poems , Penguin, 1997. Her two novels are Dear Digby, Viking (1989) and Saving St. Germ, Penguin, 1993. Dear Digby has been re-issued by Figueroa Press, in 2003.
In Spring of 2001, Random House published her third novel, Life After Death, as well as a collection of essays entitled Married to the Icepick Killer, A Poet in
She is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Book Review, and her collection of reviews and critical essays, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self, was published in the “Poets on Poetry” series of the
She is Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the new Ph.D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing at the
Sparrow, a collection of elegies for David Dukes, was published in 2003 by Random House and chosen as a National Book Award finalist in Poetry. The book also won the Yale Review’s Smart Award, plus the Chapin award from
Co-presented with the Creative Writing Program
of the Department of English