Earl Coen stopped by the other day. The pump in the aeration system had been misbehaving and Earl knows motors and pumps about as well as anyone you’ll find, so hereabouts he’s the man to call.
One very charming aspect to life in the country is that company is generally welcome, especially if the visitor is someone who lives nearby. It’s a chance to talk a little, to catch up on the latest news that is below the radar for publication but that is always of interest to the very local community.
Earl is not a young man, but he’s spruce and spry, and as he made the aeration setup work again we visited. In the course of it he mentioned an event many years ago, when at Marietta a dog got trapped on an ice floe and a fellow undertook what turned out to be a dramatic rescue. The event was memorialized in an epic poem which someone sent to the newspaper, which in turn printed it. Earl memorized it and on a warm and sunny afternoon decades later, he recited it.
After he had gone, I got to thinking about what a banquet for thought the whole event had presented.
By converting it to poetry — rhyming poetry, not this new-fangled free verse — the unknown author had done something that centuries ago was the chief way that news and other information got delivered. Before there were newspapers and television, radio and Internet, there were minstrels. If one merely tells a story, the next person telling that story might get details wrong and over time the story could change entirely. But the words of a song or poem remain constant. The minstrel or reciter of poetry was less an artist than the deliverer of information. We seldom encounter that phenomenon today.
There may be a broader issue as well. I don’t know many schoolkids, but my sense is that the skills of memorizing and reciting poetry are not given the importance in school that they were a generation or so ago. By the time I was in third grade, everyone in my class, even the slowest among us, could erupt in “Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” historical inaccuracies and all. (Longfellow hit the high spots pretty well, though.)
My sister Janie was and is the master of this; I do not think she has ever read a poem that she did not memorize and keep, to be called upon as needed. When you’re in a bad mood or otherwise upset, you can count on her turning to Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” which is probably the most inspiring poem ever. If you don’t know it, look it up — you won’t be disappointed.
My talents in this field are limited, yet even I remember the poem recited by my dad’s cousin, Bob Cummings, which memorialized the sad tale of the original wardrobe malfunction:
At the bar, at the bar, where I smoked my first cigar
And the money in my pocket rolled away:
It was there, by chance, that I ripped my Sunday pants,
And now I have to wear them every day.
The daughter of a friend back east participates in competitions where poems are assigned and, before audience and judges, delivered. But I wonder if memorizing and reciting poetry are as big a part of growing up as they used to be. I hope they are and fear that they aren’t.
The whole notion of rhyming has been cheapened a bit, I think, by sloganeering. There was a boxer, Evander “Real Deal” Holyfield, who is remembered chiefly for having his ear bitten off by Mike Tyson (after which he might have been called Evander “Real Meal” Holyfield). But before that fight he had done the language the disservice of making the words “real” and “deal” inseparable, effectively retiring the word “genuine.”
Worse, before the charity mutual fund was called the “United Way” it was called the “United Fund.” Its slogan was “give your fair share.” As a result, “fair” is the only kind of share you ever hear about anymore. The phrase has gone from clever marketing ploy to cliche to inescapable and annoying presence in the language. It has been latched onto by politicians, and we know that no good can come of that.
Meanwhile, poetry itself now mystifies me a bit. Maybe I lack the modern poetry receptor gene or something, but the wider variety of poems written since about 1940 strikes me as prose that has the lines broken up pretty much at random. In that there are learned people who appreciate modern poetry, I must assume the fault is mine. Yet it seems to me that poems which rhyme are now poo-poohed by the learned among us, and that is a shame.
Yet it is not dead. Earl Coen came by the other day, and in the course of conversation he recited a poem about an otherwise long-forgotten dog.
And for that, he left me a little bit richer.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.