The tone in Billie Bolton’s “Memorandum” is described with anger, ignorance and disappointment. It sounds exactly like she is talking to him in an angry voice “Leave me alone; I never want to hear from you ever again!”. She happens to call her ex a “boyfriend from hell” that’s who she writes the memo/poem to. Whatever he has done surely has gotten their relationship broken in half it is beyond over for them.
As for the mood of the “Memorandum” it is serious, sad, heartbreaking and unpleasant. It is the kind of mood you could imagine after the whole relationship has come crashing into pieces. The word choice of the word “Anything” follows a rhythm that describes the things she despises about him. In each sentence she mentions all the things she knew about her ex from scratch “Anything about your going interest in Lucy Liu’s legs” (Bolton).
Everything she remembers and shared with her ex-boyfriend represents how strong their relationship was. Now, she is at a point where she wants to forget everything about him she knew. It is one of the reasons why she sounds so heartbroken because she was deeply in love. She basically blames her ex for everything and she certainly does not like his childish behavior.
As she mentions she doesn’t want to hear or remember “anything that has to do with gang affiliations, court dates or swastika tattoo”(Bolton). This suggests one of the reasons why they broke up because of his criminal actions. The other reason was because of his characteristics didn’t suit her especially his temper and the fights he had with her.
The style of the poem is very different compared to other poems. This one is in paragraphs and it looks like paragraphs to questions to a homework. The writer of the poem makes an interesting event take place when Bolton uses “Memorandum” as the title it shows the mash up between a memo and a poem. The rhythm, pattern, tone, word choice and language shows a poem. But, the author’s idea to remind her ex-boyfriend of the things she never wants to hear again “Shit I Never Want To Hear Another Word About as Long as I Live” shows a memo a reminder.
I think JJkidcudi1 summarized this poem very well. I did want to mention though that although they mentioned it was a memo, she left out that this is a private e-mail. I also wanted to bring up that although the blogger mentioned the child’s criminal record as a reason for the break-up, I think that the entire e-mail is structured to show all the reasons for the break-up. The e-mail is broken up into 4 specific reasons, with specific examples for each. I think this shows that “Me” in the poem knew for a long time the relationship wasn’t a good one, but she (the persona of the poem, most likely a she) struggled through it and held back against all the issues mentioned. And now that they broke up, she feels the need to finally let it out, point out that “My Boyfriend from Hell” is not a nice person and she wants him to acknowledge it.
I like the idea of “Memorandum” as a mash-up between business writing and a poem, but does that make it seem as though it’s less of a poem than the others we read? What makes it a poem rather than, as the other commenter points out, and email message? Do we value it as a poem as much?
I don’t think “Memorandum” is any less of a poem that the others we’ve read. As we discussed before poems can really be anything. Also I feel like this poem follows a lot of very noticeable patterns that not only make it a poem by the critical sense (technical definition of just being anything portraying emotion), but really the traditional sense. The poem has a definite structure with bold bullets with a flowing rhythm of complimenting run-ons that start with “Anything about you(r)” and end with exaggerated statements that emphasize her new opinion of him: “…unless you promise to be the turkey.”, “…even if you flush it and walk away.”, “…even the Blessed Virgin.”
“Memorandum” is written in the form of an e-mail message; however having all the attributes I have mentioned on top it is written in such a clever way, that to me it makes it a more valuable poem than the norm.