What a ridiculous week

Going from being absurdly pleased by the praise for my Shakespeare performance, in which I got to climb on the teacher's desk and jump off again, to feeling like I didn't know anything and was a semi-total-failure in teaching my lesson, to having all the repressed junk come out during my conference over my equally failing metaphor for teaching and learning takes a lot out of you. I think it's time to curl up in a blanket, after sharing the semi-amusing poems I found during the latest GA mission. I think they crack me up because I remember what it was like to try and write the darn things for school.

The Sonneteers Draft
Reading from our thirteen lines, despair
Held away (only just), our lash-red brains gulped
and vomited barrel-bottom-scraped brews
of a woken and crotchety muse.

Shard of thought clashed with shard. All that we knew
Was the hole in our schema. We threw forth fronds
Cutlets of language, re-searched for a tune
Wrestled with senses and Sense, heedless, pulped

twenty copies of Figaro, slaughtered
the fatted calf, sold premium bonds
and woke on a Thursday, freshly daughtered,
Resolved as a lemma, clean as the moon.

Did we know what'd lolloped away? Did we care?
The fourteenth line'd arrived: we were there.

by Graeme Pollock (Hove; received 5/31/2002)

http://www.sonnets.org/yoursonnets/yoursonnets-p.htm#320

Workshopped to Death
By the condition of the corpse,
there's no doubt whatsoever.
It's another poem snatched from exuberance
and workshopped to death—
syntax perforated by firing squads
of constructive criticism,
red pencil bleeding out of every line,
images so mangled with ambiguity
even literati scratch their pompous heads.

Before the police arrive and cordon off the area,
I press my hand against the executed lines
and feel the fleeting heat of life just taken.
I scrape the poem into a plastic bag
and shove the bag into a cooler full of ice.
I rush the victim home.

Thousands of frail and sickly verses
sit anxiously by the phone, waiting for the call
that says a transplant has been found.
Perhaps I can salvage a liver,
a kidney, an eye, a length of gut,
a fragment of a heart once rich and sure.

Fred Longworth
http://www.lyricalworks.com/poetry/workshopped.htm