Carl Rosin

And what if the teacher is in multiple classrooms throughout the day, and multiple teachers share a room? Several different courses may be taught in a single room: how busy the board will soon become!*

*I apologize for the somewhat anachronistic diction: I’ve been reading Northanger Abbey!

Well, on Days 1 and 2, they have to sit in the same seat, lest I fail in my goal of learning their names promptly.

(I also tell them on day 1 they should wear the same clothes tomorrow. “Really?” they ask. No. Gotta love kids!)

I can imagine the grandmother understanding the girl’s reasoning (unspoken though it is: it’s like that for those dearest to us) and suppressing pride even as she seems to complain. The ambiguity of “lord / these children” elevates the poem. #PoemADayJuly

This is great. Those new teachers are lucky to have you!

(If I may: one other thing to add to “Where do I go to the restroom?” is “*When* can I go to the restroom”!)

I hope that Lehrer songs play everywhere—finally—for the next several weeks, in his honor. RIP.

@rejectednytwords.bsky.social Whatever bubbles bubbles up

I bow to you, sir, noting only that I’m far more confident in a poetry lesson than standing over a golf ball. Were Frost to watch me play, he might respond by snarkily writing something akin to “Stopping by woods (repeatedly) on a sunny morning.” #PoemADayJuly

* Re “what poems?” in my post 3/5, above: bad wifi here—I will post the whole list later in case anyone is interested—but in sum, we read 2 Dunbar, 6 Hughes, 3 McKay, 2 Cullen, 1 each Georgia Douglas Johnson, Sterling A. Brown, James Weldon Johnson, plus “Strange Fruit.”

#PoemADayJuly 5/5

I also notice: this embodies formal tradition instead of the vernacular that Dunbar uses elsewhere (like Chestnutt and some Hughes), to say, “I use your form & diction as well as anyone.” Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” & McKay’s sonnets are unsurpassed: a flex against racist doubters. #PoemADayJuly 4/5

When we read 17 poems in the unit*, one way I ask the students to taxonomize them is through whether race is explicit: why does this one not do so? The universality empowers them in one sense while hiding further in another sense. “I, Too” is an example that takes a different tack. #PoemADayJuly 3/5

This also pairs well with McKay’s “If We Must Die” and Giovanni’s “Choices” in how it interrogates the desperate seeking of *any* measure of control—and thus dignity—by the disempowered. Grinning, lying, singing, and even masking attain an ironically poignant nobility here. #PoemADayJuly 2/5

First of all, this is one of the greatest American poems, IMO. I use it with my Harlem Renaissance unit—obviously not HR but as an example of where Black American poetry was coming from in the previous generation. (It’s an interdisciplinary course.) #PoemADayJuly 1/5

God is suitably goofy here (pretty central for not being believed-in: more irony!)—has a trainee angel, like the kid with the ever-breaking voice from The Simpsons.

“Heaven on Earth” is also a comic victory: diction, imagery, and pace create a scene that’s both common and “off.”#PoemADayJuly 2/2

#PoemADayJuly I suspect the hardest thing to write well is humor, but Chen Chen is very good at it. Humor of course depends on surprise, irony, displacement—it’s best when not cheap (e.g., random scatology). The diction helps develop the right mood; he pursues the booth idea just too-far enough. 1/2

@rejectednytwords.bsky.social The sudden nonexistence of FLABBILY is doing wonders for my body image!

#PoemADayJuly I agree with you: I’m not convinced it *didn’t* matter to her. The line invites us to interrogate the narrator’s tone there, because she seems happy—surprised to be so, after some unspoken unpleasantness—and then they part. Makes us wonder what happened and mourn with them.

I love that idea, Michelle. So many poems gain such power from their titles that the untitled reading must differ from the next. E.g.: “My Papa’s Waltz,” “The US Sailor With the Japanese Skull,” “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America.”

I agree, Brett. I don’t shout at them “You’re wrong, you Philistines!” and I do address the comfort of rhyme—obviousness/cliché is of course less obviously clichéd to one with less experience—even as I do try to get them to recognize deficits in imagery and linguistic imagination.

I don’t think this poem is *bad*, but I do try to show my freshmen a truly bad one when we study love poems (during Valentine’s week, natch)…and it often doesn’t work. Many of them prefer the clichéd, forced-rhyme, imagery-free platitude to the Rita Dove or Gary Soto gems. Still working on this!

I appreciate your opening the door to admitting how a poem doesn’t hit with me—I’ve hesitated to offer negative comments during #PoemADayJuly (I felt similarly about one or two others but held my fire). It seems worthwhile for us to be able to offer critiques as well as compliment/adulation.

Jane Eyre > Wuthering Heights

(I said what I said!)

…who pick their food, build their houses, mow their golf courses, glue their pads. The American worker, too often hidden and taken for granted, is the glue that holds us together. Also reminded of Wolfe characterizing Americans as “burning in the night” (You Can’t Go Home Again). #PoemADayJuly 2/2

I noticed your comment on complicity, but I read it otherwise: as a plea for lawyers—with all their power—to be mindful of the working person who manufactured the legal pad. Master-of-the-Universe end-users often lose sight of the humanity and suffering of those… #PoemADayJuly 1/2

Gotta be true to myself!

I get to five for Dickens when I finish Our Mutual Friend!

Impressive list, Matt!

1 Lee Child
2 Robert Coover
3 Mick Herron
4 Barbara Kingsolver
5 Dennis Lehane
6 Toni Morrison
7 George Pelecanos
8 Thomas Pynchon
9 William Shakespeare
10 Kurt Vonnegut
11 Colson Whitehead
12 Don Winslow

Atwood, Lahiri, Stoppard, Geraldine Brooks, Bill Bryson at 4 each

#PoemADayJuly

“Deceptions” (8) interests me, including how it—potentially an appositive for “wasps” (7)— is split to a new line. Is a child’s natural inclination to fear danger or be skeptical, vs embracing beauty? It takes adult support to open oneself to beauty…a metaphor for teaching poetry in the first place!

Amen, but I will also admit—grudgingly—jeans.

In thinking about distance—obviously a key motif here—I’m drawn to the image of sitting on a cold hill, taking apart the telescope (12-13). It’s the tactile, active thing in an largely philosophical poem. “Move your eye away” (1) has a whiff of the tactile, but it seems less so to me. #PoemADayJuly