teaching

wen i was a teashirt                                                         1 i sometimes whent down  2 to visit teachers  3 and in the little kids  4 there was this little  5 kid that had a tantrum  6 and i picked him up  7 and held him  8 while he kicked  9 and kicked my shins  10 until he saw it didn't work.  11 then i put him down  12 and he built  13 a little block castle  14 on my outstretched hand.  15 after that i guess he went home  16 and anyway  17 i quit teaching  18 soon after cause  19 the parents  20 were making  21 little robots.  22

31 Oct 08 [!]

Author's Note

small verse for some h8er evil people at poetry critical, pointing at them. this actually did happen to me though, teaching at a freeschool when i was a kid. it's, like, that you have to just put up with it, but it doesn't make you have a nice day.

the spellings are as i want them, and the numbers are from p.c.'s format and i just copied and pasted this and left them in cause they're numbers and numbers get offended if you don't take them real serious.

Reviews

[Michael Bauer]

fabian, poetry is about reality because it derives directly from the poets ability to feel and create emotions. no fact has emotion -- nothing in nature has emotion unless we identify emotion with it.

what i'm saying isn't that chatty-chat stuff about republicans is a poetry reality -- i'm not saying anything like that at all. i'm saying that whatever you're writing about has to be constructed out of your feelings about the emotion you have about some one thing in your life, and then transformed back into feelings -- from that emotion -- and spotted on the page, so that the reader can create an emotion for himself. but, they're your feelings, with your timing and texture, and the astute reader can come close to feeling what the poem is supposed to make felt. there's only so many feelings we can have -- direct sense perceptions -- but any number of emotions for any kind of experience. the point is to make the poem an experience, since you can't bring any empirical reality into the reader's world except 'read this phrase against the next phrase and combine the two into a complex feeling -- which is to say, an 'emotion'.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

i believe there is a certain amount of reality in poetry...the reality might be behind the inspiration to write it. But I also believe that poetry is not information, it is experiencing feelings in both reading and writing.
and i agree that there are too many robots...i teach community college...and many students have to learn to think outside the box....they aren't taught that in grade school and high school...mostly they are spoon fed and expected to comply and memorize.
j.

[Raef C. Boylan]

If the "spellings are just as [you] want them", there must be a significance to the errors, which I'm just trying to figure out. Are you implying that the narrator who you've created is technically not qualified to be teaching young kids? But then, the poor spelling isn't consistent, it's only in the first two lines, so i guess that can't be it. Perhaps you threw them in at the beginning as a test/distractor, to see who couldn't get past the grammar to reach the poetry?
In which case, I better move on.

I liked the lines: "then i put him down/ and he built/a little block castle/on my outstretched hand." It's an enjoyable image if I savour it as literal; in terms of its actual meaning, I'm a bit stuck...our narrator offered his hand in support and the little kid took it for granted, made selfish use of the support...?
Likewise, I found the robot comment entertaining if I took it literally rather than it meaning something along the lines of 'the parents weren't encouraging originality in their kids'. If I knew any people who were building an army of little robots, I'd run away too.

Overall, an intriguing poem. Any feeback on the stuff I've misunderstood will be appreciated.

[Fabian G. Franklin]

To quote the author, " poetry is always about reality, " No Michael, it is not. Poetry can be many different things but more than anything, I believe it is about feeling. I mean, you don't really think Poe had that conversation with that raven do you? An example of NOT reality. I like this piece though. I think it's cute and just a bit self deprecating. And I agree with Poeticpiers about the cloning system, with perhaps the exception of magnet schools. This did bring a smile so it influenced feeling and that could be defined as poetry. Dickinson said she could only tell something was poetry when it made her feel as the top of her head were physically taken off. Personally, I don't WANT to read anything that does THAT to me! lol

[Michael Bauer]

so, what's your style of poetry. or, at least, what is it that bothers you about this one? i don't think it's poetry, by the way, just light verse, if that makes a difference.

[Poeticpiers]

To write from experience adds veracity. Although not my style of poetry I loved the reference to robots
But The education systenm is itself designed to produce clones