Friday 17 October 2014

Poetry

We're moving into poetry in the senior academic English class I'm teaching.  Poetry is one of those things that can seem a bit pretentious, especially to high school students.  We looked at contemporary lyric poems to begin with.  After some Practical Magic and other free verse I thought it might be time to take a swing at it ourselves.  I'm curious to see what students bring to class today.  Hopefully writing about something that interests them will remove that pretension and let them get some ideas on paper in the relatively unencumbered contemporary lyric format.

In My Pocket

あ and ん
alpha and omega
binary beginnings and silent ends.

ones and zeroes?
no,
math is an abstraction
but
certainty is in the machine.

waves relentlessly pound our shores,
pass through us
quantify us
connect us
ensnare us
constant attention demanded
by
this raging sea of yes and no,
profound and banal
personal collective
private crowd.

information constellations
in magnetic grips
lighter than a glance,
more certain than a second thought.

frozen moments of certainty
tumble to an event horizon
making sense of the senseless
at a ferocious rate.

I have a text!