To the criminals who taught poetry in my high school and think they got away with murder, we know who you are. We have no DNA evidence. But we have photographic evidence of you at the crime scene, my high school yearbooks from 1957 to 1961. Don’t try deny it. You’re in the photo in front of a blackboard, a Robert Frost poem in one hand, a bloody knife in the other.
You killed poetry.
You taught us that poetry is special, delicate, removed from the everyday world. You taught us that poetry is dense as diamonds, hard to understand to the point of why bother. Many of my classmates did not bother. Who could blame them. After their escape from your classroom and a quick stop at the restroom to wash the blood spatter evidence from their hands they took off and never looked back. Of Robert Frost’s two woodland roads, they took the one more traveled and that also made all the difference.
Mrs. Robinson, you led us to believe that poetry is a fanciful way to say what could be simply said. Mr. Beeson, you led us to believe that poetry was for wimps and sissies. You both led us to the false conclusion that poetry was much ado about nothing important. Such damage you have caused, leading students to believe that poets are difficult just to bore us. No, poems are difficult because life is difficult, because it takes effort to put into and read out of well-crafted words.
Poetry is the Rubik’s Cube of literature. Actually, poetry is not literature. Poetry is actually the expression of a careful observation of our multidimensional life.
Poetry is a way of knowing.
Poetry helps us see how the richness of often overlooked things.
Poetry sharpens our powers of paying attention abstract and tangible things.
Poetry refines our ability to see relationships between disparate things.
Wherever you are, Mrs. Robinson, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson forgive you. Wherever you are Mr. Beeson, Adrienne Rich and Charles Bukowski forgive you. I am not there yet. But I’m trying.
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The names have been changed to protect the guilty.