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 Mary
Ann Hoberman
Mary Ann Hoberman teaches poetry
to students at Manhattan's P.S. 115 during her spring
1997 Family Literacy residency.
Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer,
"borrowed" from my uncle's bookshelf (I still
have it, sixty years later!) when I was seven or eight,
is the book that first pointed me in my life's direction
and has remained a touchstone ever since. Undoubtedly,
the fact that I acquired it by stealth and that it had
belonged to a much-admired relative added to its aura;
but its real value was in the unimaginable richness
and variety of its content. My copy is the fourth revised
edition, published in 1930. Beginning chronologically
with Emily Dickinson and ending with Nathalia Crane,
its nearly 900 pages include 145 poets, each one represented
by from two to thirty poems along with a short biography.
Pouring over their lives, memorizing hundreds of their
poems, it was as if I had acquired 145 marvelous friends,
women and men who had miraculously achieved the title
that even as a child I valued above all others: Poet.
Throughout my lifetime, however obscure many of them
have become, their names and poems have stayed with
me. The variety of forms and cadences, of subject matter
and points of view, showed me at an early age that a
poem could be about almost anything and could be put
together in a multiplicity of ways, from the most formal
to the most free. But whatever its shape or theme, above
all it had to delight you, sing to you, motivate you
to learn it by heart. And I in turn have encouraged
the children I encounter to memorize poetry; a poem
committed to memory in childhood is a lifetime treasure.
Mary Ann Hoberman
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