The Companionship of a Poem by Billy Collins

Homework, Monday, September 28, 2015  COMMENTS - NO MORE THAN 150 WORDS

Read Collins' article below, and comment on the following.  Please add your ideas to those of the people who have posted before you. Don't just repeat what they said.

• According to Billy Collins, What can poetry do?
• What happens when we read a poem?
• Why memorize poetry?

The Companionship of a Poem      

By BILLY COLLINS

During the three decades that I have taught English at Lehman College,

I've witnessed some dramatic and turbulent changes.

They have included protests against the American presence in Vietnam 

And the end of the long tradition of free tuition at my college and others that were part of the City University of New York. But the most drastic change was the implementation in the early 1970s of open admissions, which radically altered the makeup of the student body and called for crucial adjustments in the way that we, the faculty, taught.

In the English department, we continued to assign Paradise Lost, “Kubla

Kahn,” and The Sound and the Fury, but now we had to devote much of our

energy to teaching basic skills in reading and writing. That change 

helped me discover that there was a place for poetry even in the most basic composition courses, which further led me to see the broader 

connections between poetry and learning, and -- to put it more personally – between what I do as a poet and what I do as a teacher.

I came to realize that to study poetry was to replicate the way we 

Learn and think. When we read a poem, we enter the consciousness of another. It requires that we loosen some of our fixed notions in order to accommodate another point of view -- which is a model of the kind of intellectual openness and conceptual sympathy that a liberal education seeks to encourage. To follow the connections in a metaphor is to make a mental leap, to exercise an imaginative agility, even to open a new synapse as two disparate things are linked. Flying a kite, say, can suddenly be seen as a kind of upside-down fishing; a flock of blackbirds may rise up like a handful of thrown, black confetti. I began to see connections between surprise and learning.

Further, to see how poetry fits language into the confines of form is to experience the packaging of knowledge, the need for information to be shaped and contoured to be intelligible. It is to understand that form is a way of thinking, an angle of approach.

Other parallels between poetry and learning have also intrigued me,

including those that relate to speed. As the poet William Matthews once

wrote, one of the most basic appeals of poetry is its ability to slow 

us down. To begin reading a poem is to feel a resistance in the poem's

language and its distinct meter, its compression of meaning, and its

insistence on conveying itself one line at a time. Such features will 

not allow us to rush as we would hurry through the morning newspaper. The formal arrangement of a poem checks our haste. It is no accident that probably the best-known poem by an American poet is Robert Frost's

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," a poem about the need to slow 

Down and, eventually, to stop in our tracks.

Our supersonic, digital age demands rapidity. And, understandably,

students want colleges to speed them toward their future goals. But the

true tempo of education, and the best thing about any college, is a

slowing down of things to an earlier, more human, pulse -- the 

leisurely pace of deliberation. Education may be the way to slow back down from the computer to the television, to the newspaper, to the essay, to the novel and, finally, to poetry.

Perhaps the most important connection between poetry and learning has 

To do with memory. Anyone who has taken a poetry course with me knows that I am big on memorization. That is probably because I am afraid all my students will quickly forget everything that I have told them; at least, if they memorize a poem, they will leave with a little wheel of Robert Frost or Christina Rossetti turning in their heads.

These days, however, memorization has low status as a pedagogic tool. 

It has long been devalued as quaint and old-fashioned, more suitable to 

the little red schoolhouse than the modern university. Learning by rote has taken on mechanical, robotic connotations. And the emphasis today is on the externalization of information, the shift of knowledge from the self to an outer dimension of high-speed information.

Why memorize when you could look it up? as the baseball player Casey

Stengel more or less said. But with all due respect to him, we desire 

To produce students who can do more than just look it up, students whose minds are significantly furnished by their educations, and perhaps whose hearts and sympathies have been enlarged by them. To memorize is not only to possess something, whether it be a poem or a succession of kings. It is to make what is memorized an almost physical part of us, to turn it into a companion.

Let us remember that poetry began as a memory system. Mnemosyne was, by

Zeus, the mother of all the Muses. In poetry's most ancient form, the

now-familiar features of rhyme, meter, repetition, alliteration, and 

the like were simply mnemonic devices -- tricks to facilitate the storage and retrieval of information, and vital information at that. In an oral culture, before it was possible to write anything down or look it up, knowledge had only one reliquary: the human memory, the library of the mind. The history of one's people, one's family genealogy, survival facts about hunting, fishing, and farming -- all were saved from oblivion by what we now call poetic devices.

Today, some may view poetry as a sport of dilettantes, despite its 

ability to say what cannot be said otherwise. But originally poetry was 

necessary for survival, for human identity, and it issued forth from the wellsprings of human memory.

Milan Kundera speaks of "a secret bond between slowness and memory,

between speed and forgetting." Today's student is electronically agile 

at "looking it up" -- whatever that "it" may be -- but the process of

learning still aims to make the mind more ample by internalizing 

cultural and scientific information. The virtual library of the Internet is at our fingertips, but every student is in the process of evolving into a kind of walking library as the shelves of his or her memory are gradually stacked with learning.

My predecessor as Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky,

recently started what he called the Favorite Poem Project, a kind of

national poll that seeks out ordinary Americans who know a poem by 

heart.  His campaign is a counterweight to the notion that poetry belongs exclusively to academe, and it was revealing to see and hear an airline hostess reciting Frost, a telephone lineman saying his Sandburg.

For my own part as Poet Laureate, I am starting a program called 

"POETRY 180." The "180" stands for the number of days in the school year, and the idea is that a poem will be read every day -- not studied or analyzed, just read -- to the entire student body of high schools around the country. The poems and information about using them will soon appear on the Library of Congress's Web site (http://www.loc.gov). I hope to convince students that, in addition to being a subject to be studied, poetry can be a feature of everyday life.

Also, in my fantasy commencement exercise, every graduate of every 

College would come up to the stage and recite a handful of lines of poetry before receiving a diploma. That will not happen -- it would really slow things down. But I can still hope that some are silently carrying, along with whatever else has enthralled them, the companionship of a poem.

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