When I was in Grade 10, an English literature test had a question that referred to AK Ramanujan’s poem A River. The question, set by our English teacher, asked: "What is the river that runs through Madurai."
What? Cue consternation and outrage! We tried to remember the poem; I knew it had two cows (names Brinda and Gopi) and pregnant women and women’s hair – all details I’d never expected to find in poetry. But we were certain that the poem made no mention of the name of the river.
Seeing a poem
By that time we’d become used to being mercenary about tests and the marks they brought, so that even a test on a high-minded subject like poetry that choused us out of a couple of marks with a question that had nothing to do with what we knew, made us angry.
Much later, I realised that that question made me go over the poem in my head, in my frantic search for a name. Almost photographically, I ran down the page and found steps, sand ribs, that unforgettable image of women’s hair clogging the watergates; I found cows and crocodiles and buffaloes, and poets kept inserting themselves into the poem. Without quite realising it, I’d saved to my memory the skeleton of the poem – its details, waiting for sense to accrete to them.
Enter Eliot
The same teacher, a year earlier, had put his drama class through a play of his own devising. He called it, simply, For Eliot and he claimed it was “about” a reader’s journey through Eliot’s work, beginning with incomprehension and ending with a complete identification with the poet (at which point the Reader becomes Becket and is being murdered in the cathedral).
I put scare quotes around the word about because frankly, when we were 14 we never moved beyond incomprehension and we had to take Raja’s word for it that there was a point to his play. All the same, I threw myself with fervour into learning my lines and I memorised vast portions of The Wasteland and lines from Eliot’s plays and minor poems. I knew everyone’s lines and understood less than nothing of them. But I’ve forgotten very little of what I’d learnt all those years ago.
Memory bank
If you belonged to the generation that was made to learn poetry, either for elocution competitions or as punishment, you will remember that sense of learning without understanding. If those poems stayed with you, you will also know that understanding catches up with memory eventually.
That is one of poetry’s first functions: to act as a memory bank for a people, to store their stories, hoard wisdom and keep language alive. Rhymed or unrhymed, poetry did its work with memory in subtle ways – through rhythm and metre and even the patterns of every day speech.
But when Ramanujan, in A River, begins with the poet “who sang of cities and temples”, he is aware that poets no longer sing; they “still quoted” but “no one spoke in verse” anymore. The work of memory in this kind of poetry is visual rather than aural. I remembered words and phrases by remembering how and where they appeared on the page and by – I realised – the fact that they conjured very specific images in my mind.
Remembering how a poem looks
When I try to remember poems these days, sometimes even my own, I try to recall how they look on the page. This doesn’t always work very well, as I found out a year or so ago when I vowed to learn one poem a month (I leant precisely zero poems that year).
But one month after Leonard Cohen’s Popular Problems was released, I knew the lyrics to most of the songs. I knew the lyrics because I was listening to the words again and again. I knew every pause and emphasis and the words arranged and sang themselves without my even trying.
“Heard melodies are sweet,” said Keats and offered a caveat: “but those unheard/Are sweeter." The poem that remains on the page remains potential. It can activate the imagination and conjure possibilities. But the spoken poem releases its charge in that moment. And you can’t deny that when it does, it’s sweet.
Sridala Swami's second collection of poetry, Escape Artist, was published by Aleph Book Co. in 2014. She is an alumnus of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and blogs at The Spaniard in the Works.
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What? Cue consternation and outrage! We tried to remember the poem; I knew it had two cows (names Brinda and Gopi) and pregnant women and women’s hair – all details I’d never expected to find in poetry. But we were certain that the poem made no mention of the name of the river.
Seeing a poem
By that time we’d become used to being mercenary about tests and the marks they brought, so that even a test on a high-minded subject like poetry that choused us out of a couple of marks with a question that had nothing to do with what we knew, made us angry.
Much later, I realised that that question made me go over the poem in my head, in my frantic search for a name. Almost photographically, I ran down the page and found steps, sand ribs, that unforgettable image of women’s hair clogging the watergates; I found cows and crocodiles and buffaloes, and poets kept inserting themselves into the poem. Without quite realising it, I’d saved to my memory the skeleton of the poem – its details, waiting for sense to accrete to them.
Enter Eliot
The same teacher, a year earlier, had put his drama class through a play of his own devising. He called it, simply, For Eliot and he claimed it was “about” a reader’s journey through Eliot’s work, beginning with incomprehension and ending with a complete identification with the poet (at which point the Reader becomes Becket and is being murdered in the cathedral).
I put scare quotes around the word about because frankly, when we were 14 we never moved beyond incomprehension and we had to take Raja’s word for it that there was a point to his play. All the same, I threw myself with fervour into learning my lines and I memorised vast portions of The Wasteland and lines from Eliot’s plays and minor poems. I knew everyone’s lines and understood less than nothing of them. But I’ve forgotten very little of what I’d learnt all those years ago.
Memory bank
If you belonged to the generation that was made to learn poetry, either for elocution competitions or as punishment, you will remember that sense of learning without understanding. If those poems stayed with you, you will also know that understanding catches up with memory eventually.
That is one of poetry’s first functions: to act as a memory bank for a people, to store their stories, hoard wisdom and keep language alive. Rhymed or unrhymed, poetry did its work with memory in subtle ways – through rhythm and metre and even the patterns of every day speech.
But when Ramanujan, in A River, begins with the poet “who sang of cities and temples”, he is aware that poets no longer sing; they “still quoted” but “no one spoke in verse” anymore. The work of memory in this kind of poetry is visual rather than aural. I remembered words and phrases by remembering how and where they appeared on the page and by – I realised – the fact that they conjured very specific images in my mind.
Remembering how a poem looks
When I try to remember poems these days, sometimes even my own, I try to recall how they look on the page. This doesn’t always work very well, as I found out a year or so ago when I vowed to learn one poem a month (I leant precisely zero poems that year).
But one month after Leonard Cohen’s Popular Problems was released, I knew the lyrics to most of the songs. I knew the lyrics because I was listening to the words again and again. I knew every pause and emphasis and the words arranged and sang themselves without my even trying.
“Heard melodies are sweet,” said Keats and offered a caveat: “but those unheard/Are sweeter." The poem that remains on the page remains potential. It can activate the imagination and conjure possibilities. But the spoken poem releases its charge in that moment. And you can’t deny that when it does, it’s sweet.
Sridala Swami's second collection of poetry, Escape Artist, was published by Aleph Book Co. in 2014. She is an alumnus of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and blogs at The Spaniard in the Works.