Living the science of learning research
AuthorDr Nina HoodCategoriesTeaching
The transformative power of performing poetry by heart
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Date16th Jan 2023AuthorTim ShortisCategoriesTeaching
In November 2012 Andrew Motion, the poet, and former poet laureate, and Julie Blake, a former teacher of English in a sixth form college, embarked on the national schools’ poetry speaking competition they called Poetry By Heart. The competition launched on 7th January 2013 with a timeline of poems on a website built from scratch in under seven weeks. From that standing start, thousands of young people in hundreds of schools and colleges joined in. They explored the timeline anthology to choose the two poems they then committed to memory, one pre-1914 and one post 1914; they crafted their performances to speak their words clearly, thoughtfully, and accurately; they practised them to the point of their satisfaction; they shared them out loud in public spaces - in the words of one student, starting with the family dog and gradually building the audience. And they listened to others doing the same.
You could have heard a pin drop. To nearly everyone’s surprise, attending to a person speaking their memorisation of someone else’s words proved strangely compelling. The courage alone seemed to elicit respect. Then there was the recognition of the difficulty of having a poem off by heart. The poem performances appeared to have more vivid life than occurs when the same poem was read silently, or even aloud from a book. We wondered why and we wonder still. Perhaps the manner of such a performance integrates both a poem and a person’s sense of that poem. Possibly. We have even come to think of the best of these performances as a form of embodied literary interpretation: one that attends to a poem’s meanings, its form on the page, its musicality, and its mystery. In this interpretation we’ve been influenced by our poet judges, and especially by Glyn Maxwell and his account of the materiality of poems in his book On Poetry.
We have also noticed that people seem to enjoy comparing the videos on our website showing the same poem being recited differently, and by implication construing it differently, with a different interpretation to be inferred. Try watching the versions of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge’s The Witch, for example.
The first year of Poetry By Heart happened at breakneck speed; we didn’t know how it would work, or even if it would. We heard comments to the effect that young people are in the spoken word generation, aren’t interested in poetry, especially the old stuff, except possibly in writing it, and have outsourced their memory to their gadgets. So it was a relief as well as a joy to share in the astonishment of the poet judges and invited audience, who were bowled over by the quality of that they saw at the first finals event at the National Portrait Gallery on 28th April 2013; an audience equally amazed and delighted by the audacious, wide-ranging poem selections from across time, space, gender, and diversity. The young people performing confounded stereotyped preconceptions of poetry recitation as the thundering-out of the old chestnuts written by dead white men.
Poetry by Heart continues to surprise us, and especially for the way the contestants take responsibility for what they do, their ingenuity, and their perseverance. In contrast to the instructional models of Professor Rosenshine, learning a chosen poem is done by the learner themselves with limited direct instruction: no-one can explore poetry for you; no-one can know the poem which will speak best to you; no-one can learn a poem for you; no-one can speak a poem for you; no-one can know and understand a poem in quite the way you do. And as you reach for the words to voice a text which exists only in your muscle memory and psychological interiority, the poem belongs to you in that moment of its voicing. This is a long way from being guided by an expert in an act of textual exegesis, with the associated practices of annotating a poem for retrieval of its features and meanings or writing an essay of discursive literary criticism about it. There are also commonalities: many contestants do mark up their chosen poems, but to help focus on how they will speak them. Their teachers guide them in doing this and by giving them expert feedback as they rehearse.
Sharing a memorised poem out loud in public space - or recitation - is an ancient, attested literacy practice, and is also valued by many more recent poets including Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Michael Donaghy and Alice Oswald. A staple of early state education, it had fallen into comparative discredit and disuse in schooling by 2010 [Jacques & Whitley 2022]; the academic and pedagogical literature is correspondingly sparse. When Professor Catherine Robson was preparing Heartbeats, her landmark study comparing 19th century practices of poetry recitation in the US and the UK (Robson 2011) she paid one of her children to learn and recite a poem so she could observe what was involved; she reconstructed the practice of recitation mainly from a scholarly imagining sourced in the historical and literary record of their depiction in print. Ten years later, Poetry By Heart maintains an archive of over a thousand poem performances recorded at national finals events, including multiple versions of the same poems. Thousands of students have been though the same process as Robson Junior. Some of these recorded performances can be found on the website, either below the poems on the poem pages or in the performance galleries. A favourite? So many: perhaps Oliver’s take on Thomas Hardy’s Channel Firing – but watch William’s too!
Ten years on and Poetry By Heart is now open to children and young people aged from 7 upwards. At this year’s finale, winners from every region in England will speak their chosen poems on stage at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. For the first time, A Level and GCSE students can choose any of their set text poems as one of their poem choices. We want to encourage teachers and students to explore working with poems in this way, without anxiety about the notional opportunity cost to coverage of the assessed curriculum. That said, teachers have consistently told us that Poetry By Heart participation boosts attainment at all levels of ability. It’s time to investigate such claims more doggedly; this is one method for doing that.
We welcome the opportunity to write this particular blogpost because there is a special connection between Poetry By Heart and sixth form colleges. Most of the very best performances we have seen have been by contestants in Years 12 and 13, with a significant proportion of those being by contestants studying in sixth form colleges. This does not surprise the team which built Poetry By Heart, who have previous lives as teachers and Senior Leadership Team members in those dear and special institutions for 16-19 education.
Tim Shortis is co-director of Poetry by Heart.
Giveaway
Sign up your college to participate in this year’s poetry By Heart competition and we’ll send you a poem a month calendar, competition pack and publicity posters. Registered schools also get a 40% discount on the paperback edition of the Poetry By Heart Key Stage 5 anthology.
We are offering six free copies of the anthology and six copies of Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry to the first 12 sixth form college teachers to sign up. Email info@poetrybyheart.org.uk to enter, making Sixth Form Colleges Association Prize Draw the title of your email, and please indicate your book preference.
References
Blake, J. et al. 2014. Poetry by Heart: Poems for learning and reciting. London: Penguin.
Jacques, Z., and Whitley D. 2022. ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me!’: Whatever happened to poetry memorisation in schools?’, English in Education 56:2 pp. 108-121, DOI: 10.1080/04250494.2019.1646099
Maxwell, G. 2012. On poetry. London: Oberon Books.
Robson, C. 2011. Heartbeats: Everyday life and the memorized poem. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.