Day 37

So today the girlfriend told me about an english assignment she'd been given. The assignment was to take a normal sentence or two from some journalistic source and re-arrange the sentence(s) into a free-verse poem. So, she made this poem from a couple sentences from a news headline:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The rebels arrived on
the outskirts of Chad’s capital, N’djamena,
on Friday after a
three-day push across the desert
from its eastern border with Sudan.
Government forces and
rebels
clashed for a third day
on Monday with
gunfire and shelling
heard throughout the city, a UN official
said.

Thousands of people were
fleeing
the city.
Casualties from the fighting
in N’djamena were
believed to be high, and
the violence threatened
peacekeeping and aid
operations
intended
to
stabilize
a wide swath of Africa that borders
the
war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I personally think the assignment is stupid. I voiced my opinion, and composed an alternative poem which I believe fulfills the same intended requirements of the assignment, but makes it way cooler:

Find a sentence
Writes the teacher, and
Chop it up.
Accent the wrong
Stops
And let the right words flow.

The student stared at
The media outlets pondering
“How unpoetic
Their language can be!”
This is arbitrary,

Thought the girl,
As her prose froze.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the first and probably last time you'll ever see me write a poem.

Comments

Anonymous said…
that was
rather
clever
of y
ou..
..!
2:40 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 58

I do fear, sometimes, that the act of pondering aloud has become a cathartic experience and nothing more . It is hard in this town to find a diversity of thought, because we've all been raised in very similar ways with the same norms, experiences, and conventions. I find that the mightiest opinions of some of the the twentysomethings I know are so damningly narrow that they cannot possibly stand to the slightest breeze of doubt. Often the biggest theory is the thinnest. Our shadows grow long and starved moments before they disappear under the sunset. The natural world has cursed us with its indifference, its vaccuum of conscience in which deeds neither good nor evil subsist. I find the urge to view our species of conscious and conscientious beings as alien. It is as though the world we inhabit was never intended for us to inhabit it. In short, this town is a box. This country, political system, individualistic ideology, humanist dogma, faux rebellion against imagined authority; it ...
Read more

Day 212

It is very true that the best people in the world at any discipline, skill, sport, instrument (etc). are never particularly well-rounded people. There should be, as my grandma mentioned over dinner last night, a competition for "well-roundedness" with international competitors. In order to win you'd have to be physically capable, perhaps musical and mathematical, moral and charitable, very learned, and so forth. And that's the interesting thing, the jacks of all trades get absolutely no attention from the peanut gallery. But on the contrary, they typically have the healthiest and happiest and most fulfilling of lives. I can't tell you how many young pianists I've met, for whom piano was the sole self-measure of pride and value. And, like all people who have themselves judged for one thing, they are utterly miserable, feeling highs and lows that appear and fade as quickly as do the passing opinions of strangers. --- On a tangent: some of the most miserable girl...
Read more

Day 168

You hear non-religious people say it all the time: "If only there was a God! That would honestly be great, if there was a supreme moral arbier in the universe looking out for my every action and running the universe with me in mind. It's really too bad there isn't." I used to say that, until I came across a few authors who vehemently claim that such a wish is, in reality, a wish for slavery. When we ask for the comfort of a god (or fantasize for it anyway) were asking for a kind of absolution that only the slave can have. And the price for that is extremely high. And still, there times when I do wish I were this sort of slave, though I no longer say so with a smile.
Read more