The Garden of Verse: New Month, New Poems to School Us in the Ways of the World

September's Verse-Virtual, the online poetry journal, offers poems by 34 poets, including "Why Do We Have to Have a Seating Chart" by Sylvia Cavanaugh. 
        This is not only a good poem, and a good poem about going to school, it's also a good argument for the existence of public schools. 
         The poem "Why Do We Have to Have a Seating Chart" begins this way: 

Because structure breeds creation
because this city is segregated
because you don’t live near her
because she goes to her synagogue once a week
because you don’t speak her language
because poverty speaks its own language...

          In her author's note to this poem, Sylvia writes: 

"High school can feel so vibrant and alive with the mix of students all interacting and learning about each other. Sometimes though, students resist this newness and want to associate and sit with only those they know already. I change my seating chart about every three weeks and my students have come to appreciate the variety of students they sit near and work with...."

          This poem grabbed me with its first few lines and had me ready to march in favor of more federal money for public schools before you could say "Betsy DeVos." Please read the rest of Sylvia's poem at http://www.verse-virtual.com/sylvia-cavanaugh-2018-september.html

          But, whoops, here comes another perspective on school days from poet Donna Hilbert, who states in her introduction to her poem "Mr. Eliot: that it concerns "the most influential teacher I ever had, I am sorry to say." We're well warned; her poem begins:

My bald-headed sixth-grade teacher,
Mr. Eliot, put me in the cloakroom
to teach me a lesson.
He said, get used to it,
you’re not the teacher’s pet anymore.
He gave me a bucket
and said, when you fill it with tears
you can come out.

         Yes, we need good schools. We need fewer 'Mr. Eliots' in them. Read the rest of Donna's poem at http://www.verse-virtual.com/donna-hilbert-2018-september.html 

             Mike Minassian's poem "The Fallout Shelter" takes us to school (informally speaking) on another subject. When a survivalist shelter is built in a family's backyard, it turns out to be an unconventional approach to what people need to survive:

....one room lined with shelves
filled not with the jars of food,
saltine tins, and jugs of water
we half expected, but instead
books of poetry and long-lost novels,
Picasso prints and Rembrandt self-portraits,
my parent’s wedding photo,
and tiny handprints of my sister and me at birth
leaned up against my grandmother’s
hand crocheted lace doily.

You can read the rest of Mike's poem at http://www.verse-virtual.com/michael-minassian-2018-september.html 

          For something completely different, my own poem "Long Island Calling" is an attempt at dialoguing with Walt Whitman's great poem about middle age, "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life." In his poem Walt uses the Indian name for Long Island, "Paumanok." My poem begins this way:
           
 
Are you gently then my lover?
Calling Walt, on the shore, Paumanok 5-1-6
I too walked these shores, troubled and down-hearted,
life-wrestling, though not like you with the gods of Jacob's Ladder 
who page their poet on the daemon line,
brooding-busy with lower concerns -- and now this!
As you ebb with the tide of life
late thirties poor unmarried son of a failing line,
to live once more with your special, easily agitated brother in the Brooklyn walk-up
on whose bed you sat one evening entertaining Bronson Alcott and Thoreau,
who watched you as if an animal could speak
Enough to send me haunting the endless Paumanok shoreline
            (and I'm not sure I'd return)...

         You can read the rest of this poem at http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2018-september.html 

         For the full contents of September 2018 issue of Verse-Virtual see http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html