On Poetry Workshops with Fifth Graders

The day after this photo, I came upon the same girl in the school washroom, her face two inches from the mirror, bedazzling herself with her beauty.

Poets don't explain, but I'm prosing here so lighten up. My l has gone out on my keyboard, not all the way out, but I have to go back and add the l's in a self-conscious manner. Ditto with commas. It is already the case that my on button does not exist in the way most people's on button does. A few years ago my screen light went out - the computer worked fine, but there was no visible evidence. My very tech-savvy partner took the machine apart and replaced the little phosphorescent beetles and yea there was light. He broke the on button in the process of reattaching the screen unit to the keyboard base. In the circular depression where the on button used to be are four metal prongs that stick up in the identical size and pattern as the pokey thing medical people use to give TB skin tests. They (prongs not medical people) were having some difficulty remaining at attention last year so they now live in a pool of epoxy. This is elegaic musing as we have placed an order for a new laptop which costs about $200 less than replacing the screen unit would have two years ago and will also feature 200 times the memory and the ability to cut CDs though not paper dolls which brings me to why I enjoy working with fifth graders.

I love working with fifth and sixth graders because when I brought in the many magazines for them to cut up for self portrait collages to go with and be influences for self portrait poems they are also writing I had several Weekly World Newses I had forgotten about in the bottom of the box. Two of the kids could not stop reading the articles aloud to the rest of us, as we laughed, snipped, and glued images. One asked me why I had them and I said they were staples of entertainment and that my two favorite covers are: "B52 Found on Moon" followed two weeks later by "B52 Disappears from Moon". "You are so cool," the kid said. These are my people.