Poetry Friday: Memorizing Shakespeare

It's been too long since I mentioned Shakespeare. So...

www.MemorizeShakespeare.com

The idea is that you download an MP3 file which contains all your lines, divided into short sequences. You listen and repeat after the bell, building fluency as you go. You learn your own lines, then have them cued to you by the other character's lines.

I downloaded the free sample of Hamlet's famous "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy, and I'm working on it. I'll let you know how it goes. Right now, I feel like "an unlettered, small-knowing soul." (Love's Labour's Lost I, 1)

So why do it? Because...

"A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs. ---from Ars Poetica by Archibald Macleish

The rest here.

Maybe I should memorize that one, too...


Poetry Friday is hosted by Kelly at Big A, little a

Poetry Friday: I want to know it by heart

I made a vow to memorize a poem this month. Adrienne inspired me.

But memorization doesn't come as easily to me as it did when I was a teenager. I once memorized an entire scene in a couple of hours when an actress had to drop out of a theater showcase we were performing that night. And I can still recite, from 9th grade English class, Cassius's speech from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

"Why, man he doth bestride the narrow world
like a Colossus and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

But now? Tell me a simple thing, like your name, and I'll forget it in two seconds.

So to help my old brain, I made an audio recording of me reading the poem I want to memorize: God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

If you want to join me, here's a list of great tips to help you memorize poetry. And from the same source, a list of "starter" poems to try. There is also a whole site devoted to a national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud, and one that podcasts classic poetry in a deep, rich voice with an English accent. (Don't know who it is, because the "About Me" section says: "Who I am is not important. The point is the poetry."

Also, since cloudscome is launching her brilliant idea to leave poetry where people might find it, I'm going to post this one inside that gazebo I blogged about several Poetry Fridays ago. I wonder what my poetry graffiti friends will think of it?


God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

---Gerard Manley Hopkins

***For another reading of this poem, go to the Favorite Poem Project and click on the Stanley Kunitz video link. He blew me away talking about how he encountered this poem for the first time and what it meant to him.

Poetry Friday is hosted by a wrung sponge.