po-pos of the world.”
-- Inspector Percy Bysshe "Dirty" Shelley (pictured above)
From the AP
From bad to verse: Vandals get classroom penance
By JOHN CURRAN, Associated Press WriterMon Jun 2, 3:36 PM ET
Call it poetic justice: More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost's former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.
Using "The Road Not Taken" and another poem as jumping-off points, Frost biographer Jay Parini hopes to show the vandals the error of their ways — and the redemptive power of poetry.
"I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people's property in the future and would also learn something from the experience," said prosecutor John Quinn.
The vandalism occurred at the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, where Frost spent more than 20 summers before his death in 1963. Now owned by Middlebury College, the unheated farmhouse on a dead-end road is used occasionally by the college and is open in the warmer months.
On Dec. 28, a 17-year-old former Middlebury College employee decided to hold a party and gave a friend $100 to buy beer. Word spread. Up to 50 people descended on the farm, the revelry turning destructive after a chair broke and someone threw it into the fireplace.
When it was over, windows, antique furniture and china had been broken, fire extinguishers discharged, and carpeting soiled with vomit and urine. Empty beer cans and drug paraphernalia were left behind. The damage was put at $10,600.
...
No word on whether or not the delinquents involved were taunted with
I know what you're thinking, punk.before being taken into custody.
You're thinking, 'Did he pen six stanzas or only five?'
Still, fairly creative and not exactly the worst sentence ever meted out for messing up a writer's estate.
For example, you really don't even want to know what happened to the punk
who egged Poe's house.
2 comments:
Something to do with a pit and a pendulum?
fuck. I loved Frost when I was 17.
rotten little douchebags. fuck teaching the wastrels poetry, I'd've gotten Medieval on their asses..
But on a more realistic thought. Make them (and their miserable failures of parents) pay for it, cash, up front or jail time. Now there's poetry, hangin in the pokey with mom and dad. I gotcher Iambic Pentameter right here, bitchez!
okay, I'm officially an ornery old bastard now. Damn whippersnappers! getoffmylawn!
"There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory."
-Marcel Proust
my hope/curse for them is that they should grow this wise.
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