On National Poetry Day, former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, describes his love for poetry and the enormous benefits of learning it by heart instead of by rote. His organisation, Poetry Archive, has founded Poetry by Heart - a national poetry-remembering competition for secondary school pupils. Tell us what your favourite poem is below.
Former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.
Like most people born in the 1950s, my early school experience of learning poetry by heart was pretty grim. Occasionally the gloom was brightened by a teacher making it fun (in the way we were asked to learn, as well as in the poems chosen), but generally it was a matter of boring poems being boringly presented, and surrounded by a sense of impending punishment if we failed to remember them.
Rote learning, in other words, has a lot to be said against it. Learning by heart, on the other hand, is a wonderful thing (as I only saw in gleams and glances as a child). And especially wonderful when it comes to remembering poems, which have the delightful advantage of being organised in ways (involving rhythm and rhyme) that make learning them easy. As the phrase 'learning by heart' implies, this sort of remembering places the poem at a central place in ourselves and makes it precious; it allows the poem to draw strength from the emotional batteries we carry everywhere inside us, and reboots them; it makes the poem a permanent fixture of our selves, so that its meanings change and develop as we grown. And as it does all these things, it combines 'hard' benefits (information, knowledge, even perhaps wisdom) with 'soft' things that matter just as much. Things like pleasure and fun and entertainment and entrancement.
These are all qualities that my fellow organisers and I make the guiding principles of Poetry by Heart, which is a poetry-remembering competition for secondary school pupils, launched two years ago with funding from the Department of Education and under the auspices of the Poetry Archive (which I co-founded during my time as Poet Laureate).
As the phrase 'learning by heart' implies, this sort of remembering places the poem at a central place in ourselves and makes it precious; it allows the poem to draw strength from the emotional batteries we carry everywhere inside us, and reboots them; it makes the poem a permanent fixture of our selves, so that its meanings change and develop as we grown.
The competition works like this. With guidance, stimulation and encouragement from the Poetry by Heart team, individual schools run individual competitions, from which the winners progress to a county round (usually held in a library in the County Town), and thence to the semi-finals, and thence to the grand final. Entrants have to learn two poems each (and a third if they reach the final), which they choose from the competition anthology: the longest poems are a couple of pages and the shortest are sonnets.
For the first two years of the competition, this anthology has only been available online: it contains 200 poems, with one poem by each poet included, and ranges from Beowulf through to poems written in the last year or so. Contestants have to learn one poem written before 1914, and one poem written after 1914, and if they reach the final they choose something from a sub-set of poems that's presented alongside the main anthology - a sub-set that will vary over time, and at the moment contains poetry written during and about the First World War.
Does this all sound a bit controlling and therefore limiting? Actually it's the opposite. The purpose of all our directions is to steer students away from what they already know, or might be studying for their course-work, and into the embrace of poems they've probably never heard of. And to reassure them as they make their journey of discovery, we've written little biographies of each poet, and short introductions to each poem.
The online version of the anthology has worked very well. Last year (and from a strong high base) we increased the number of those involved in the competition by 20%. This year, our third year, we're already breaking through through into even larger numbers.
To help make this breakthrough happen, we're publishing (with Penguin) the anthology as a book - poems, biographies, introductions, the lot. And because the whole idea of the thing is so closely involved with sound, we've also added QR codes to several of the poems, so people can point at them with their smart phones and download readings that are hosted on the Poetry Archive.
Our intention in compiling the anthology was to combine the best of old and new, raw and cooked, wild and tame, familiar and strange; our aim in constructing it as we have done, was to make it a pioneering kind of publication, in which the sense world and the sound world of poetry are given equal attention and value.
Just as it is in each round of the competition, for which we hope nothing less than that it should become a shining feature of the school calendar – and (why not?) of the national calendar. As you can hear on the Poetry by Heart website, the standard of entries has been amazingly high from the start; and as anyone can imagine, the amount of collateral benefit it brings to the students and the schools is equally impressive. We hope very much that having the anthology in book form as well as online, will help to make the competition a permanent feature of our landscape.
Poetry by Heart, by Andrew Motion, Julie Blake, Mike Dixon, & Jean Sprackland is published by Viking and available from Amazon.
By Andrew Motion
Twitter: @motionandrew
This was my party piece when I was a little girl
Wandering Jack
Listen to the song of Wandering Jack
He carries a bundle on his back.
What is inside it
No one can tell
He carries inside it dreams to sell.
Some cost a penny
Some cost a pound
And some cost nothing
I'll be bound.
Always followed by a hearty round of family clapping. 
Yes. There's something special about it is n't there anno. 
I especially love the last four lines.
I also know the poem I remember, I remember, By Thomas Hood but it's too long to write here.
I love poetry. Children should definately have the opportunity to learn it at school.
gillybob did you see Pointless when they wanted words of more than six letters from Jabberwocky? It was the final and had I been a contestant, I would have won the jackpot. I think I could recite most of it, but it might get a bit muddled.
My grandma is a quiz program addict and she saw it hildajenniJ .Bless her knowing how much I loved the poem she telephoned me to say she had recorded it for me. Sadly most of it was missing from the recording although I will try and get it on catch up. Like you I can recite quite a bit of it but I also get a bit "muddled" with the order . It's a great poem to encourage children to use their imagination isn't it?
Kindle!!!
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