Request for poems

[stephantom.livejournal.com]

Hi, folks. I'd like to ask for some help, if I could. I'm a student teacher and I'm starting a unit on Monday... basically on the why behind this whole reading and writing thing. The need for communication, the power of written word to express one's perspective, experiences, identity, as well as to learn about other people's perspectives, experiences, etc... This is 7th grade, by the way. And the point is, I'm looking for poems that could be used to talk/think about how difficult it can be for people to really understand each other. People trying to understand each other, struggling, maybe failing...

I offer you one poem I've got so far:


A Single Slice Reveals Them
by Naomi Shihab Nye

An apple on the table

hides its seeds

so neatly

under seamless skin.


But we talk and talk and talk

to let somebody

in.

Comments

[theratmanknows.livejournal.com]

7th grade is a hard target demographic, haha, but here's what came to mind:


Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.



it might also be worth looking at some political poets - hughes (maybe "children's rhymes"?) or jean valentine.

although the more i think about it, the more i think that my entire english degree is committed to answering this question, and any poem of any value should be addressing this question to a certain degree, if not as explicitly self-referentially as the o'hara, then at least implicitly in its choice to be a poem (and not a painting or essay or interpretive dance or conversation the poet kept to himself).

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Ha, lovely poem. :D