Bad High School Poetry

For my educational psychology class this semester, I’ve been sitting in on an English class at Grinnell High School once a week. The students have been in a poetry unit for the past couple weeks and, as part of my observation, I’ve written poems alongside the teacher and students. I’m posting a couple that I’ve written so far, even though they tend to be on-the-nose and poorly constructed, in part to show off the fascinating poetic structures that the English teacher is using, and partly because I’m trying to get back into the habit of doing these Monday posts.

Fibonacci Poems: This structure uses the fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8) to determine the number of syllables or words in each line. Since the fibonacci sequence has a deep and confusing relationship to biology, I tried to use motifs of life and existence in my poems, which mostly ended up making them melodramatic and overblown.

Prompt: Pickles (Version 1)

Old

Girl.

Our sick

Caretaker.

Drank a glass of green.

We stood to the side and we winced.

Prompt: Pickles (Version 2)

Lab.

Strange.

Unclear

Why we need

Humans grown in brine.

Pickled people, puckered from birth.

Prompt: Light

Light,

Heat,

And all

Energy

Spread thin and even.

Cold, democratic, and lifeless.

Prompt: Hands

Underneath

Skin

Knuckles, joints,

Assembled from birth

But hidden, save for x-rays.

You’ll never see your own structure in life.

Collage Poem: This one was more straightforward: just mine a copy of National Geographic for its most poetic terms, cut them out, and organize them into a poem. The issue I used was focused on environmental issues relating to water, and it had a car advertisement on the first page, so most of my writing came from playing those two off each other. It came off as heavy-handed and preachy, but I still like some of the turns of phrase.

Can Ford Help a Family?

Chromed exhaust tips construct a religion.

We speak innovation: The creative life force of the universe.

We speak car. No one should have to.

Mother Earth was impregnated by direct fuel injection.

Small family, foraging for human existence on a mouth-wateringly flat plateau.

Water-stressed flower.

Insecticide is scribbled with light.