By Robert Oliphant

There's nothing new about reciting poems in public, even by non-poets. Who can forget Anne of Green Gables declaiming Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman" in front of a gaggle of adults swilling tea? Or Ronald Reagan (so we're told) keeping his orator's chops in shape by reciting "The Cremation of Sam Magee"? For mainstream poetry lovers, then, a rewarding American renaissance may lie ahead, thanks to the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest, as cosponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.

POETRY OUT LOUD AND GREAT POETRY. . . . Early this year the contest kicked off with trial runs in Chicago and Washington, DC, where the winner, a Nigerian girl, presented three mainstream poems selected from those most frequently anthologized today: as tabulated and ranked by the Columbia Granger's® Index to Poetry, and as presented in The Top 500 Poems, edited by William Harmon.

This winning program (probably less than ten minutes) comprised "Jabberwocky" (28 lines, ranked 18 th ) by Lewis Carroll, "The Second Coming" (22 lines, ranked 19 th ) by William Butler Yeats, and "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (29 lines, ranked 46 th ), by Ezra Pound.

The Granger's® ranking of a poem's relative "greatness" is based upon how many times it appears in the source group of 400 current poetry anthologies; Blake's "The Tyger " is at the top with 50 appearances (1995 edition). Objectively considered, then, our Granger's® rankings (available in nearly every public library) represent a very satisfactory and publicly verifiable definition of "great poetry," a phrase used in their Letters of Welcome by both Dana Gioia , chairman of the NEA, and John Barr, president of the National Poetry Foundation.

By way of illustration, I'm appending a Granger's®-based list, " America 's 100 Most Memorable Poems." Each is under 32 lines and ranks in the top 150 Granger's® group; so the list comes close, I feel, to representing what the Washington finalists must have considered in designing their personal best three-poem memorization and recitation programs.

MEMORIZATION AND PREPARATION TIME. . . . Memorizing poetry is quite difficult, even for high school and college students. It's true that most of us can memorize a 110- word Shakespearean sonnet in less than an hour if we concentrate. But it's also true that most of us will have almost completely forgotten it twenty minutes later. Our Washington winner, with 79 lines to learn by heart, probably had to log an overall total of 20 hours to produce the kind of mastery required for acceptable public performance

This effort, though impressive, would have been far less daunting than the 40 hours or more hours required to prepare a more challenging three-poem program composed of perennial favorites like Coleridge's " Kubla Khan (54 lines, ranked 7th th in Granger's®), Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" (46 lines, ranked 11 th ), and Browning's "My Last Duchess" (56 lines, ranked 43 rd ).

As designed, the Poetry Out Loud contest calls for one poem to be chosen, learned, and recited at the classroom level, followed by two poems at the school level and three at both the state and national level. Consequently, since there's no explicit line or wordage requirement, it's likely that most of the contest participants, like our Washington winner, will choose poems that are short (less than 30 lines) and relatively easy to memorize, thanks to their familiar rhythms and rhyme schemes.

NEW PARTNERS, NEW POETS, AND A STACK-THE-DECK POLICY. . . . Poetry Out Loud has added some new participants, namely, all of our state arts councils and the National Council of Teachers of English. In connection with this new partnership, it has also added a number of poems by new poets, most of which are barren of memory-friendly rhythms and rhyme schemes.

The program's current 100-poem list ( www.poetryoutloud.org ) certainly invites us to conclude that it has been redesigned to favor relatively unknown and memory-unfriendly poets at the expense of the memory-friendly mainstream poets in the Granger's® Index. Here are the key features of the new list.

> Exclusion of short high-ranking mainstream poems . . . . Though selected by our Washington winner, "The Second Coming" is not on the new list , Nor is Shakespeare's "That time of year thou mayst in me behold (14 lines, ranked 5 th ) or Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud" (14 lines, ranked 13 th ).

> Inclusion of overly long mainstream poems . . . . We have seen how the three-poem requirement nudges contestants toward choosing relatively short poems. But the official Poems Out Loud list now includes bizarre monster-length poems like "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (48 lines) and "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" (59 lines)," along with "The Spider and the Fly" (480 words to learn via 48 ten-word lines) and the Coleridge-Marvell-Browning group previously mentioned.

> Inclusion of short poems by unknown modern poets . With these as alternatives, it is highly likely that many contestants will be inclined to take their chances with shorter modernist poems like those by Rita Dove (12 lines), Benjamin Alire Sáenz (14 lines), and Shirly Geok -Lin Lim (21 lines).

> Presumptive evidence of discriminatory intentions . . . . Accidents can happen. And inferences regarding motivation are always risky. By way of a test case, though, we can take a quick look at what the program web site identifies as "25 Added Poems." This list includes both mainstream and modern poets. But the mainstream poets are represented by longer works, e.g., " Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbirds" (54 lines, ranked 382 nd , by Wallace Stevens, and "anyone lived in a pretty how town (36 lines, ranked 240 th ), by E.E. Cummings.

Since this list was recently compiled, we can fairly infer that Poetry Out Loud wants to encourage relatively unknown modern poets at the expense of mainstream "memory friendly" poets (though longish, the Cummings poem slides very smoothly into the mind's ear).

Officially, Poetry Out Loud is still committed to the memorization and recitation of "great poetry." But its new design invites a more precise label on the order of "No Aspiring Poet Left Behind," along with charges of favoritism and cronyism similar to those currently shouted at us via www.foetry.com . And remember, most modernist poetry, despite its brevity, is twice as hard to memorize and retain as truly great mainstream poems of the same length.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . One train cannot run on two tracks simultaneously. We can certainly agree here that many modern poets will probably get the attention they deserve in tomorrow's poetry anthologies, along with being called "great." But as matters stand, the Poetry Out Loud list is clearly stacked against greatness and in favor of ephemeral modernity.

The program itself, though, is still fundamentally sound and generous spirited. By way of ensuring public support and full participation, here's a damage-control agenda to consider.

> Be Up Front . . . . Modern poets deserve encouragement, especially serious ones. So why not draw up a statement explaining the reasoning behind the new list. Surely the American public deserves something better than an implied "Trust us!"

> Get Out of the Classroom . . . .

Memorizing poetry (I've done plenty of it recently) is a solitary personal-best activity, and high school students are far better at it than older Americans, including teachers and some poets. Yet the Poetry Out Loud program guide calls for roughly 15 hours of classroom activity to be orchestrated and inspired by the teacher, which means that 15 hours of precious classroom time must be hijacked from other school-level commitments, including improving student performance on standardized tests.

Let the students pick their poems, give them a test, and move the winners up to the school competition - surely one hour of classroom time could bring this off.

> Give the Kids More Money . . . . The web site tells us that Poetry Out Loud is well funded: $500,000 from the NEA and $500,000 from the Poetry Foundation. I see no reason why half of this money shouldn't go to performance awards at every level. Memorizing poetry, as I've already noted, is hard brute force labor, no matter what kind of system is used; and public performance is a sweaty-palms nightmare for all of us. Less money for conferences, more for hard work - what's wrong with this as a policy for Poetry Out Loud?

*****

AMERICA 'S 100 MOST MEMORABLE POEMS: A FACTUALLY-BASED RANKING

This ranked list (R1, R2, R3, etc.)is based on the most frequently anthologized short poems (under 200 words) in the Columbia Granger's® Index to Poetry, Ninth Edition, 1992. The number of lines and words in each poem appears in parentheses. As of 12-2-05 these rankings parallel their internet status, e.g., 37,000 "hits," for Blake's "The Tyger " (R1), as opposed to 3,500 for "When I Am Dead," by Christina Rossetti (R81). Since this factually based list is roughly the same as the first edition of Granger's, we can reasonably that twenty years from now it will have changed very little, thereby underscoring Oscar Wilde's lament, "I fear becoming Modern; one goes out of date so quickly."

R1: The Tiger, William Blake (28/120); R2: That Time of Life Thou Mayst in Me Behold, William Shakespeare (14/105); R3: Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins (11/82); R4: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost (16/120); R5: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, Christopher Marlowe (24/156); R6: Death, Be Not Proud, John Donne (14/130); R7: Upon Julia's Clothes, Robert Herrick (6/37); R8: To Lucasta , Going to the Wars, Richard Lovelace (12/72); R9: The World Is Too Much with Us, William Wordsworth (14/126); R11: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, John Keats (14/112).

R11: Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll (28/161) ; R12 : The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats (22/153); R13: Ozymandias , Percy Bysshe Shelley (14/115); R14: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? William Shakespeare (14/119); R15: Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds, William Shakespeare (14/107); R16: Fear No More the Heat of the Sun, William Shakespeare (24/152); R17: To Helen, Edgar Allan Poe (15/77); R18: Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Emily Dickinson (24/120); R19: The Windhover , Gerard Manley Hopkins (14/138); R20: Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfrid Owen (14/112).

R21: When Icicles Hang by the Wall, William Shakespeare (18/108); R22: Batter My Heart, Three- Person'd God, John Donne (14/122); R23: Love Bade Me Welcome, George Herbert (18/14); R24: God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins (14/113); R25: Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas (19/156); R26: Western Wind, Anonymous (4/26); R27: They Flee from Me That Sometime Me Did Seek, Sir Thomas Wyatt (21/157); R28: The Good-Morrow, John Donne (21/182); R29: Delight in Disorder, Robert Herrick (14/77); R30: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth (24/156).

R31: Spring and Fall, Gerard Manley Hopkins (15/82); R32: Leda and the Swan, William Butler Yeats (14/106); R33: Go, Lovely Rose, Edmund Waller (15/87); R34: The Retreat, Henry Vaughn (32/168); R35: London, William Blake (16/104); R36: And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times, William Blake (16/96); R37: Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, William Wordsworth (14/111); R38: The Splendor Falls, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (18/67); R39: The Darkling Thrush, Thomas Hardy (32/156); R40: Loveliest of Trees, A.E. Housman (12/69);

R41: Adieu, Farewell, Earth's Bliss, Thomas Nashe (30, excluding refrain/196) ; R42 : Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, Ben Jonson (16/96); R43: Why So Pale and Wan, Fond Lover? Sir John Suckling (15/75); R44: The Solitary Reaper, William Wordsworth (32/162); R45: Break, Break, Break, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (16/96); R46: Crossing the Bar, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (16/100); R47: Musée des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden (21/179); R48: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell (5/51); R49: Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies, William Shakespeare (9/51); R51: When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought, William Shakespeare (14/108).

R51: Piping down the Valleys Wild, William Blake (20/115); R52: So We'll Go No More a-Roving, George Gordon, Lord Byron (12/75); R53: I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died, Emily Dickinson (16/101); R54: Miniver Cheevy , Edward Arlington Robinson (32/184); ); R55: Since There's No Hope, Come Let Us Kiss and Part, Michael Drayton (14/111); R56: O Mistress Mine, William Shakespeare (12/75); R57: At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners, John Donne (14/12); R58: On My First Son, Ben Jonson (12/102); R59: Virtue, George Herbert (16/200); R60: Ask Me No More Where Jove Bestows, Thomas Carew (20/135).

R61: Concord Hymn, Ralph Waldo Emerson (16/112); R62: The Lake Isle of Innisfree , William Butler Yeats (12/120); R63: Non Sum Qualis , Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae , Ernest Dowson (18/198); R64: My Papa's Waltz, Theodore Roethke (14/114); R65: The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, Sir Walter Ralegh (24/148); R66: Go and Catch a Falling Star, John Donne (27/138) R67: The Sun Rising, John Donne (30/180); R68: To Althea, from Prison, Richard Lovelace (24/126); R69: The Sick Rose, William Blake (8/39); R70: The Eagle, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (6/39).

R71: Home Thoughts from Abroad, Robert Browning (20/129) ; R72 : A Narrow Fellow in the Grass, Emily Dickinson (24/120); R73: Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter, John Crowe Ransom (16/108); R74: With How Sad Steps, O Moon, Thou Climb'st the Skies! Sir Philip Sidney (14/119); R75: The Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame, William Shakespeare (14/110); R76: Hymn to Diana, Ben Jonson (18/90); R77: The Pulley, George Herbert (20/140); R78 The Lamb, William Blake (20/112); R79: She Walks in Beauty, George Gordon, Lord Byron (18/117); R81: Tears, Idle Tears, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (20/160).

R81: When I am Dead, Christina Rossetti (16/96); R82: The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams (8/16); R83: A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, Dylan Thomas (24/132); R84: The Burning Babe, Robert Southwell (16/176); R85: When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes, William Shakespeare (14/111); R86: To Daffodils, Robert Herrick (20/46); R87: A Red, Red Rose, Robert Burns (16/92); R88: To a Waterfowl, William Cullen Bryant (24/200); R89: Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe (26/169); R90: Felix Randall, Gerard Manley Hopkins (14/154).

R91: No Worst, There Is None, Gerard Manley Hopkins (14/119); R92: To an Athlete Dying Young, A.E. Housman (28/196); R93: Fire and Ice, Robert Frost (9/49); R94: The Waking, Theodore Roethke (18/162); R95: The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, Dylan Thomas (22/185); R96: When Daisies Pied, William Shakespeare (18/99); R97: A Hymn to God the Father, John Donne (18/129); R98: On His Deceased Wife, John Milton (14/117); R99: When I Have Fears, John Keats (14/119); R100: Meeting at Night, Robert Browning (12/74).