I Can’t Remember but I Can Memorize

I can memorize and recite TS Eliot, but I can't remember to put the wash in the dryer or stop at the store on my way home from work. I can memorize and recite Victor Hugo, but I can't remember to pay the electric bill or send a thank you note. I can memorize and recite Emily Dickenson but I can't remember to move my car before the meter expires or punch my timecard when I come back from lunch. What's going on here?

It's simple. I love poetry. I couldn't care less about laundry or thank-you notes.

I have a formal education, including a BA in English, but I didn't discover poetry until many years after I'd forgotten everything I'd learned in school. I was working at a golf course, mowing fairways and roughs early in the morning. The work was pleasant enough, but it was mindless and I was getting tired of my own repetitive thoughts. "How in the world will I pay my rent at $6 per hour?" "Think the boss will bring me a diet coke and some Quaker Oats granola bars soon?" "How am I going to pay the electric bill?"

And then one day I was talking to a guy who was surprised I'd never read Shakespeare's Sonnets. I'm easily shamed, so I picked up a copy the next day. It was a slim volume containing 154 poems, each with one stanza of 14 lines (except one with 15 lines), an end-line rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG (with that same one exception), 10 syllables per line (with many slight exceptions), and a catchy iambic pentameter rhythm (with one exception of trochaic tetrameter). In short, one of these mellifluous sonnets could be memorized in the time it took to cut 14 swaths on the fairways. And I was hooked. The sonnets freed me of my tediously repetitious and pedestrian thoughts.

Some thirty-nine sonnets later, I had to quit my job at the golf course. Despite a head-full of worthy thoughts like "So are you to my thoughts as food to life" and "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day" and "O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem" — $6 per hour never did pay the rent or the electric bill. The boss didn't always bring treats when he should have, either.

So I moved on. I don't remember (because I don't care) what my next job was. But my next poet was Edgar Allen Poe ("Hear the sledges with the bells, / Silver bells!" and "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea," and of course "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,"). Then on to Eliot ("Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky,") and Auden ("Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone).

Oops. Gotta go. Forgot. Something's burning in the oven.