generally speaking, my kids, who performed well in just about every other section of the njask test, always performed poorly on these poetry questions, and said, dad, “poetry’s hard.” no other subject, to my elementary school children, was ever “hard.”

i had to wonder how much time the teachers actually spent preparing my children for the poetry questions, or did the teachers just blow off teaching poetry because nobody really cares how kids perform on the poetry section of the test? you could do pretty crappy in the poetry section and still score very well on the overall test.

http://www.state.nj.us/education/assessment/es/sample/NJ-LAL_sample.pdf
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Terreson
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An undiscovered world,
a locked chest full of rage,
empty thoughts,
an animal in a cage,
time rushing,
black, impenetrable fog,
a raft on a river,
paying no attention to my steps,
a silent mask,
all these in a melting pot —
my life.
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I was fortunate to go to a high school that devoted a trimester of freshman year (taught by someone who did not shy from wading through Wallace Stevens with kids just out of middle school), the majority of the sophomore year English literature survey, and a trimester of the AP sequence to poetry, offered focused elective courses like “Ted and Sylvia,” and occasionally brought professional poets to give workshops.

Of course we found time to read Shakespeare, Sophocles, Hemingway, Faulkner, Austen, Dostoevsky, Beckett, etc. But the lines that still kick around in my head from then are “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table” (that one is also still chalked somewhere on the inner wall of the clock tower…); “A car radio bleats, / ‘Love, O careless Love . . .’ I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell”; “Next, confession – the dreary part. / At night deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. / They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, of course, / they’re beautiful. But why? What makes them beautiful?”; “Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, / The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, / Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, / And of ourselves and of our origins, / In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”; “And if these things, as being thine by right, / Move not thy heavy grace”; “And any chair / that’s empty here, / that’s someone / who is dying: / Find him.”

I remember an injunction, in a workshop (Martin Lammon’s, I think), to dig for meaty Germanic diction, and the concept of “syntactic gaps,” the space between two adjacently stated ideas without an explicit transition: a pun on “synaptic gaps,” the space between neurons that signals have to leap.

And I remember when a group of us who spent our free periods in a certain hallway were temporarily kicked out for leaving it messy. People protested by taping up a copy of “The Death of the Hired Man” with highlighter on “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in. / I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
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