Assigned Reading

A new James Donald Forbes McCann poem

How does one get one’s poetry into the schools?

How does one get one’s poetry into the curriculum?

How do poems become the object of teenager-level homework

So frequently that teachers are ubiquitously sick of them?

I want to move units by sheer obligation.

I want to dominate shelves at the Salvation Army.

I want parents to say ‘I remember these poems’

And for lines from them to be tattooed over the scarified skin of young women who have committed to stopping self-harming.

Who is it that must be moved? How’s the moving to be done?

Which woman, man, or I suspect, which team of twenty women?

Which university where those key twenty women went

That they might be crowned the ultimate arbiters of generational poetry excellence?

What is it that they want? What is it they think they can get away with?

What is it that won’t make them worry about backlash from the reticent parents of kids?

What is that golden line? Being great is not enough.

Being great is very easy. Being politique is real tough stuff.

Greatness spews out of everybody, everywhere and everyday:

The jazz band and the hatstand and the Crip Walk and the gay

And the factory farm a-farming, and the athlete in flight

From the great and easy morning ‘til the horrifying respite,

Peter pan and the panhandler,

Chelsea football, Chelsea Handler,

That which one perceives to be

The family life of Adam Sandler

And some films of Adam Sandler

And the city of New Orleans.

Heston, Oliver, Nigella,

Gordon Ramsay, rice and beans.

Fuck objective excellence

And death to inspiration!

Long live middle-school syllabuses,

Spark notes and unenthusiastic recitation!

Look at my face! Look at my face!

Death! Death! Death! Die, ad orientum!

The golden age is over!

Pile high the lovely argentum!

Kiss me! Kissing! Yes! A very fine place

To start the undertaking,

To garner the attention

Of the students newly out out-making.

A little sex then gender.

A little class then death.

And one or two techniques

And fifty-fucking-thousand shibboleths.

And it must be oh just short enough

That it can be assigned.

And it must be yes just long enough

To write enough on come exam time.

And at least a little bit of it

Must be out of the student’s reach

Because if it’s all too simple, the English teachers

Won’t have very much to teach.

But it has fundamentally got to be

Broadly comprehensible

Because in general, English teachers

Are not especially intelligent people —

And one put that in the poem,

English teachers will not be offended

Because they have low opinions of one another

And will think that they are the exception.