Writing a parody poem isn’t something I often do – so why did I? Because ahem, because well “Stopping By Woods on A snowy Evening” is one of the few things I’ve memorized, at least deliberately. I seem to have hundreds of song lyrics in my head but I never set out to keep those, they just stick. The poem along with a soliloquy from “Hamlet” are about the only bits I’ve ever memorized.

In college, we created a play out of the trial transcript of the Trial of the Chicago 8/7 and at one point, I had a five PAGE monologue. We cut it because well, I dunno, because it was five PAGES? Because I knew I couldn’t or because we were afraid the audience would throw things? Who remembers. But it was 1971, I think, and the trial was still stunning. I played/read the words of one of the prosecutors and didn’t have to ham it up. I cut it to three pages. That was still a lot to blurt out. Boy, them lawyers can talk, huh?

My sister, btw recently sent me a book that recaps that trial and it is stunning to see the judicial misconduct and behavior that took place. Hard to know if today it would be broadcast on Court TV (shudder) and if Judge Hoffman would be censured or trashed in the press – the real press. I do get that he was sorely upset by the behavior of the defendants. I do also get that they might not have done everything they DID if he’d behaved a little less stupidly. Many of the objections the defense had were, it seems to me proper. Certainly, the denial of his attorney of choice to Bobby Seale was enough to merit Hoffman’s being dumped from the bench I would think since most lawsuits can easily be delayed and this was a case of someone recovering from an operation, Not misconduct on the part of the lawyer. Telling someone “no you have to use THESE lawyers” is bad enough. Yes, the defendants were outrageous, but they had reason to be, I guess I believe. They were accused of conspiring with each other when in fact most of them did NOT KNOW the other people they were allegedly conspiring with. It’s hard to imagine Rennie Davis sitting down with Bobby Seale and Dave Dellinger and Jerry Rubin to conspire. Just bizarre – an ugly and bizarre time.

But I digress – so what else is new? Because I wanted to talk about memorizing and poetry and such. I’ve been in a few plays, not very many, and struggled to memorize my lines but did it. In thinking about memorizing poetry, I wondered exactly what the hell the point was.

I talked with my mother the other day about the Longfellow postage stamp that just came out and was telling her that the clerk at the post office and I agreed that we liked “The Children’s Hour” but I had problems remembering “Edith with the Golden Hair” (my brain provided only Jeannie whose hair was light brown and once it got in, would not leave). My mother then recited the first two stanzas of the poem to me. We had liked it and read it to each other as I was growing up; I seem to remember we had a poetry anthology and would flip through it for fun. But boy had I not remembered “Between the dark and the daylight, when the night is beginning to lower, comes a pause in the day’s occupation, that is known as the children’s hour.” …but my 82 year old mother who forgets stuff remembered it. Wonder if she had to memorize it.

In high school, I think it was, at one point all the students in my English class had to memorize 15 lines of poetry. As you can guess, I went for “Stopping by Woods….” Which is sixteen lines long and has meter and rhythm to die for which made it way easier to remember.

Some time later, in senior English class – god help me it was AP English – we were forced to memorize what was it 25 lines from Hamlet. Mind you, this teacher SUCKED ROCKS. She was a lazy jerk who should not have been given the responsibility of teaching AP English – overachiever English because it mattered to many of us that we learn that curriculum. At the time, you took an exam and if you scored 4 or 5 (out of 1 through 5) my college gave you a pass and you didn’t have to go through English 101 or whatever. Later they dripped it to 3 – which really infuriated me since I got a 3 in AP Latin…..grrrr, too late.

But memorizing was not part of the AP curriculum, nor was writing our autobiographies (“for your college entrance applications, they all want autobiographies) which we then later were to read aloud. NOR was reading GB Shaw aloud in class part of the AP curriculum. In fact, she was a using the damn class to correct papers from OTHER classes. We caught on – duh, it only took a few weeks – and one day started doing Act 2 or 3 or 4 in, as I recall, Transylvanian “Count Dracula” accents. I gotta tell you, Major Barbara never sounded so good. And it was amazing how long it took this lazy jerk to catch on and actually hear it. All she did was order us to read to ourselves for the rest of class. NO discussion of the damn play or the author or nothing. She later did follow the curriculum but again, her intense laziness resulted in us learning jackshit. I still recall that she assigned a short sort collection by Pirandello; the quiz she gave us was solely aimed at seeing that we had read it, not understood it nor analyzed it. But the questions were “why did Giorgio turn his face the to the wall?” to be sure we read story # 7 or whatever. I recall making it up – Giorgio , ah he was heartbroken, as Lucia loved another. I hadn’t read the damn story, of course not.

I hated most of my high school English classes and would not have ever thought to take English in college. It was all memorization and telling the teacher what the teacher had told us. There was not a lot of free-thinking or “what do you think the author meant?” I had a few good teachers – thank you Pat Yosha for getting me to write my first poem, but you ain’t gonna hear me thanking my teachers in my acknowledgements when my first book comes out (my WHAT????) because it was boring boring DULL and boring. In the late 60s, there was nothing I can remember liking about English class. One year was American Lit, one was European one was (that was senior year of course) World lit or whatever. And sorry but I’m a Philistine or something. I can’t stand Dickens, never got Hemingway, and yeah, I liked Shaw, but I’d seen Major Barbara already at the Hartford Stage Company. And no one ever offered me something I would relate to or like. It was the time of mostly dead white guys and I don’t do well reading many of them.

We must have had some Steinbeck, but it didn’t stick at the time. I don’t recall a single female author (but probably that wouldn’t have helped, as I still can’t read Austen and have only read one Bronte, and I bet those would have been our only choices.) It’s possible they tried a woman writer senior year – I have a vague memory of a book by someone from India, but a) it was not a good year and b) I doubt it was a good book, to be honest, since it seems everything was chosen to be the least offensive work possible. It must be so different now, but I was so DONE with English by the time I graduated from high school in 1970.

Happily I did try some college courses where in fact the teacher wanted to know what I thought and what I thought the author intended. That was a lucky fluke, since he was substituting that semester, teaching the Shakespeare course while The Shakespeare Professor was on sabbatical. Word had it that TSP had a direct pipeline to Shakespeare himself so knew EXACTLY what he meant every time. Feh, pooey. Who needs that? I suspect his dissertation was involved and whatever he had written couldn’t be challenged. All I know is how lucky I was to get the fill-in guy, who made the course come alive and was cool and interesting (and had married a student but never mind….)

The Hamlet I memorized? In 1968 or so, the musical “Hair” had come out. One of the songs in that work was taken directly from Hamlet. Since I seemed to be able to memorize anything if it’s put to music, and I already had the entire album memorized (and can STILL sing “Frank Mills” as can several friends of mine as we proved at a party a few months ago) I took my copy of “Hamlet” and listened to the record, found one place where the lyrics switched a word, skipped some lines but I was able to sit in class (yes, we had to write it out during AP English class of course – she got a few more papers graded that way, dontcha know?) humming to myself. Because “What a Piece of Work is Man” comes to just about the 25 lines (depending on spacing but it worked then, trust me) that we were required to commit to memory.

“What a Piece of Work is Man
How noble in reason!
how infinite in faculties!
in form and moving, how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel!
in apprehension, how like a god!
the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth
this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory,
this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”

I can still sing it.

But WHAT the heck is the point of memorizing any lines anyway? Just because we could? To show discipline? Did you have to do this? Did you get the point of it?