Greetings, friends! My poem today is #101 in this year's Stafford Challenge (and #466, including last year's Stafford Challenge poem count).
Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day suggestion: “For today's prompt, write a fan poem.”
Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompt: write a “poem in which all the verses contain the same number of lines (whether couplets, triplets, quatrains, etc.) and in which you give the reader instructions of some kind."
Combining prompts again ... had good luck with that this month so far. Rhymed couplets and some mentions of "fan."
Adventures in Dentistry
I walked into the dentist’s office this morning
with no ideas about today’s poem. None brewing,
even simmering slightly. As the hygienist was
scaling — scrape scrape — I began to realize
I have more than a few stories about dentistry.
(How do you rhyme that? Palmistry? Fancy-free?)
When I was in the Army, I was in the dentist’s chair
and went “Ow!” while he was drilling. With a glare
he growled, “If it hurts that much, I’ll just pull it.”
I gotta say, I didn’t make any more noise. Just took it.
Not a fan of that chairside manner. When they pulled
my wisdom teeth, they gave me IV Valium. The oral
surgeon was doing whatever (I wasn’t knocked out)
with all sorts of crunching, grinding, and other loud
sounds, but I couldn’t care. I was floating somewhere
near the ceiling, a peaceful summer cloud, not a care
in the world. At some point, he said, “Okay, you
are done.” I remember being baffled. “Did you do
something?” When I was three or four, my dad
took me with him to the dentist for whatever odd
reason, and I ended up having to sit in the treatment
room while the dentist was pulling a tooth. He couldn’t
extract it and actually put his foot on my dad’s chest!
That’s my nightmare memory about visiting the dentist.
A lovely memory about dentists centers on a hygienist,
actually. In my late 20s, after an appointment, I asked
the hygienist out and she said yes. Paula,
rodeo rider, art history major in college.
She became my girlfriend, and I recall
wondering how someone could fall
for a patient after scaling their teeth!
Still a fan of Paula, a beautiful redhead.
So what’s the moral of this long poem?
Next time you’re in the dentist chair, don’t
obsess on the scraping and whirring.
Just let your mind drift over everything!
—Draft by Vince Gotera [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Alan's poem takes on the perspective of an English professor reading student essays; there's a mention of characters from James Joyce's short story "The Dead."
The Five-Paragraph Essay Must Die
These twenty-somethings
enrolled in any
upper-division
literature class
should all know better
than to follow that
familiar pattern
of tell them what you’ll
tell them, tell them, tell
them what you’ve told them.
Well, now, God damn it,
Gabriel Conroy
has just realized
his wife, Gretta, has
not loved him as much
as a youth she’s known
as a girl, who’s died
in part of knowing
he will not live hers.
But these enrollees
submit chickenshit
formulaic gobs
of labels, Goddamned
generalities,
and dead, cold, safe hearts.
—Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Alan is combining both prompts here: the fan aspect is covered by the speaker not being a fan, quite strongly, of the five-paragraph essay; the NaPoWriMo prompt is satisfied by the poem being in quintains, so that all the stanzas have the same number of lines: five. And clearly the poem is instructional in an entertaining fashion. It's also quite clever that the poem rails against the five-paragraph essay format but uses five-line stanzas.
Thanks for coming by the blog, everyone. See you again tomorrow?
Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. Thanks!
Ingat, everyone. ヅ |
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