As children and even before birth we knew that sound and vibrations originated in the womb, through the mother's breath and heartbeat, our first meters, echoes, rhymes, and rhythms were embedded in our nervous systems. As infants and toddlers, our earliest sleep songs and comfort songs were felt and heard.
And memorization work entered us in metered lines that were built to remember. These lessons continued as we began school and received our first religious instruction. But as schools and religions grew over the last fifty years into formidable corporate identities, they have increasingly turned from the magic of poetry to the more manageable, quantitative pleasures of test scores and egotistic Us versus Them dogma. Students are not so much educated as trained to perform well on standardized tests. They are not taught to think for themselves, question, or be curious. They're encouraged to accept what they're told without hesitation. Just as school have choked off the poetry in us by teaching it less and less, our big-business religions have also estranged us from imagination and rigorous spiritual inquiry. When religions grow into organizations, their individual members diminish, becoming pawns in political campaigns or cash cows in fundraisers. Some who attend services do so more out of habit than devotion. Their prayers do not emanate from the heart. As a result, we develop a gnawing hunger. We know that we want and need more and we yearn for the return to a living spiritual worship.
From Poetry as Spiritual Practice by Robert McDowell
Even before school days mothers quoted Mother Goose rhymes and poetic verses as aids to memorization. Remember your mother or aunt singing rhymes to you?
This was recited for us to remember the days of the week.
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace;
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go;
Friday's child works hard for its living;
But the child that is born on the Sabbath day is good.
I remember the practices of reciting poetry and songs in elementary school, and daily reciting the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, and in high school memorizing Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the Preamble to the Constitution.
This poem taught us how to memorize the days of each month.
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
February has twenty-eight alone,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting leap year, that's the time --
When February's days are twenty-nine.
A Limerick is in the Making
I tried to write a quintet,
And turn it into a limerick;
But the anapestic and iambic foot
Kept getting in the way that I took.
Is this going to be a limerick or a quintet?
The rhyme needed an iambic table.
I tried AABBA that turned into an iambic fable.
Was it stressed or unstressed syllables
Is that the proper order?
Is this going to be a limerick or a quintet?
