Poetry – Page 37 – michael jarmer

#376: Poem on April 2, 2021

Happy 2nd of April, friends, and the second day of National Poetry Month. The sun is out. And after a full day of looking at a computer screen, teaching kids and grading their work from a distance, and spewing imaginary lectures to recalcitrant seniors in IB English, I had to take a break. I satContinue reading “#376: Poem on April 2, 2021”

#375: Poem on April 1, 2021

Okay, first of all, happy National Poetry Month! Second of all, I feel just a little bit of shame that I have not posted a poem on this blog site since April 30th of 2020. I have, over the last seven years, been in the habit of celebrating National Poetry Month by writing a singleContinue reading “#375: Poem on April 1, 2021”

Congratulations: You’ve Written Another 30 Poems. Now What?

May 1st and May 2nd I spent all day both days not writing a poem. I continued not writing poetry on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. It turns out, no poetry was written into the days and the week ahead, so that today, on the 10th of May, I have written not a single poem.Continue reading “Congratulations: You’ve Written Another 30 Poems. Now What?”

#374: Ode for a Colleague Leaving

You are a force of nature, a force to be reckoned with in the best possible way; students say they are afraid of you and yet they love you, clearly. What they fear, actually, is your disappointment, not your wrath; although, to be fair, you can be wrathful– I’ve seen it with my own eyes;Continue reading “#374: Ode for a Colleague Leaving”

#373: A Prose Poem Meditation on the Penultimate Day of National Poetry Month by the American English Teacher in His Potentially Penultimate Professional Year, Ending in a Rhyming Couplet, II

Last year on April 29 I wrote a poem with this same title, hence, the Roman numeral two punctuating its conclusion. Let this be the second part of a prose poem meditation on the penultimate day of National Poetry Month by the American English Teacher in his potentially penultimate professional year, ending in a rhymingContinue reading “#373: A Prose Poem Meditation on the Penultimate Day of National Poetry Month by the American English Teacher in His Potentially Penultimate Professional Year, Ending in a Rhyming Couplet, II”

#372: Day 28 Hummingbird Haiku

My sophomores, under the gentle tutelage of a wonderfully gifted student teacher, are distance learning about imagery, beyond the sort of rudimentary understanding that imagery is language that appeals to the senses, into a deeper knowledge that imagery plays on both the intellect and the emotions, that it is associative, that it often works bestContinue reading “#372: Day 28 Hummingbird Haiku”

#371: Monday Review

I’d give it two stars. I’d say that so far, its performance has been uneven, like it can’t decide really what it wants to be. Heavy rain early, then cloudy, then a clearing, dry enough for a dog walk, but too damn warm. Muggy, almost. Monday has forgotten that we live in the PacificContinue reading “#371: Monday Review”

#369: Some Kind of Hymn

(after James Schuyler and for Cresslyn Clay) Moss grows on the roofs of the garage and the woodshed and the weather is shitty, again. This April, it’s unseasonably warm and dry with spells that go on for days of rain and clouds, gray spells. We’re in the middle of one of those. We sit atContinue reading “#369: Some Kind of Hymn”

#368: It’s Friday

It’s Friday at the end of the second weirdest teaching week in history and I’m not going to write a poem about a piece of fruit. In my resistance to writing about fruit, in addition to a number of diversions today, I almost neglected to write a poem at all. My impulse today was toContinue reading “#368: It’s Friday”