School Stories 3 - more English

In English we’ve just finished the poetry unit. (“We’re finished with poetry,” our professor said on Monday, and quickly added, “We’re hopefully never finished with poetry.”)

I had a couple more revealing thoughts about poetry: first, I decided poetry is kind of like a magic eye puzzle. Some people are really good at figuring them out, but to me they’re just a big mess of no particular picture which I can sometimes see lines or shapes in a little part of, but that’s about it. Second, I think a new way to write poetry would to use Babelfish and have something go from language to language and then back to English. The jarbled text would instantly be full of hidden meanings for readers to discover. I guarantee there would even be poetic devices in the poems, just by chance, so we could analyze those, too.

People in my class like to describe most of the poems the same way—the lady behind me thinks probably half of the poems are about divorce, because she’s been through two divorces. Another girl in my class describes most of the poems as “childish” or “immature”, (because she was once a child and immature? Hah.) Serious poems, funny poems, whatever, they’re all about divorce and they’re all childish. Mmmkay.

My professor has a funny way of describing things, which makes class more exciting. She was telling us a few days ago that she can’t summarize books. She said someone will say “Oh, you’re reading that book, what’s it about?” and she says she’ll either say something like “There’s this man and another man and they talk a lot” or she’ll try to tell them every page. I thought that was kind of funny.

Or she said she felt like she was “selling herself,” because she kept reminding us of her office hours and encouraging us to come by if we have questions. “I’m available to be utilized as a resource,” she rephrased.

We were talking about the crisis in traditional plot structure, and she said “Crisis is not always super dramatic. THE BUILDING’S ON FIRE!! PEOPLE ARE JUMPING OUT THE WINDOW!! It can be subtle.”

She also dresses really cute.

The End.