Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Poetical in Pensacola Offers Up a Poem. Our Post of the Week.

Teaching, Early November


for College Misery, on the start of your tenth year

I am not a snowflake, but
I'm in the deep drifts now:
like a bear starving in the winter
I cannot make my bed
in a hollow of body heat
blanketed with flakes
but must climb out
or waste away trapped below.

The drifts of paper slide
as I move
things from one side
to the other.
I've given up on trays,
on software,
and file folders are a fantasy:
instead
a storm of flowering
post-it notes,
profusion of yellow,
orange, blue,
nodding caps shout
"DEADLINE"
"ATTENTION"
and
"TO DO TODAY"
in banks of weeks gone by.

The Outlook stream never freezes,
chattering over the stones
with icy fingers,
problems to solve right now,
and a call for proposals:
fat salmon of possibility
that I can't reach:
I'm still buried.

I'll excavate,
(I must, or die)
push aside those piles,
use the circular file,
delegate, and delete.

Summer can't come soon enough.




© 2014. All rights reserved.

10 comments:

  1. My place offers plenty of misery now and again, but at least we don't use Outlook!

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  2. The question is, does it qualify as academic haiku. I know it's real 3-5-3 or the bastardized western 5-7-5, but if I remember correctly academic haiku is angsty and enigmatic verse about education?

    Regardless, cool stuff, PinP! Love it.

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  3. We've got another poet! Hurrah! I especially like the "fat salmon of possibility" shimmering just out of reach in the maelstrom.

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  4. I just realized Dr. Tingle has not been around since the reboot.

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    Replies
    1. Very true. But I'm not googling his name on my office computer....

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  5. Oh yes, the "fat salmon of possibility" – I've seen him, swimming always just out of reach…

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  6. Poetical in PensacolaNovember 6, 2014 at 1:21 PM

    Thanks, y'all for your kind words.

    @Hec- Well, it is certainly not haiku by form, but I think it does some justice to its subject matter.
    @EC1 Oh yes, we must use Outlook, or the 365 bastard online version (ick!)

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  7. This page and the one that preceded it, Rate Your Students, has a long history of the academic haiku, which apparently is anything under the sun that appears to be poetry. It's the K sounds...they like that. They're silly.

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