Two good articles I found via the invaluable Arts & Letters Daily: "
Style: a Pleasure for the Reader, or the Writer?," by Ben Yagoda, and "In Defense of Memorization" by Michael Knox Beran. Yagoda takes on the very general issue of style as expressive vs style as instrumental. I think of my poetry as being very reader-centered — meter, for me, means less as a way of inventing than as a way of affecting the reader. But I'm not much interested in convincing readers or conveying a message. I lie a lot, and I don't believe much more than half of the things my poems' people say, at least after their poems are finished. What I want is for readers to remember the poem, to learn it by heart.
A Plea to Boys and Girls
Your learned Lear's Nonsense Rhymes by heart, not rote;
You learned Pope's Iliad by rote, not heart;
These terms should be distinguished if you quote
My verses, children—keep them poles apart—
And call the man a liar who says I wrote
All that I wrote in love, for love of art.
Robert Graves
But as Beran points out in the second essay, learning by things by rote (even, perhaps, Pope's Iliad), is a powerful way of increasing the flexibility of one's own thoughts and styles. The plurals are mine and quite deliberate. Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur each have, even in their eighties, literally thousands of poems by heart, and Hecht says he's seldom enjoyed the poetry of anyone who didn't. I thought my own stock of memorized poems not so bad before this last time at West Chester, listening to Hecht, Lewis Turco, Mark Jarman, and David Mason. Here's one I do know, from Graves again, for Nada:
Flying Crooked
The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has—who knows so well as I?—
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
7:45:06 PM 
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