It’s the adjunct instructor’s way: happily accept—that is, don’t ever let on how desperately close to financial dissolution you always are—to teach any class a school offers to throw your way. This summer—despite the fact I normally teach writing process classes like first- and second-semester freshman composition or technical writing—I taught two sections of Brit lit in the first summer session followed in the second session by two sections of American lit from 1865 to present.

As I madly prepped for class lectures and discussions—it’s been over ten years since I taught a lit class, primarily because of an eight-year jump as a book publisher at our local technical college—I was reintroduced to classics I hadn’t thought about in years along with a healthy dose of texts I’d never read at all. That’s when I decided to to memorize a poem a week for the next year because, you know, at the very least, at the end of the year I’ll know some cool poems of my own choosing, for whatever that’s worth.

(Or, that is to say, I have three cats, two ex-wives, and a motorcycle that leaks oil so my dance card isn’t that full on any given night even under the best of circumstances. Netflix, microwave popcorn, and a sixer of Miller Lite tallboys, anyone?)

First out of the chute last week—and inspired by his Ted Talks presentation I made my American lit students watch—I chose Billy Collin’s “Introduction to Poetry“:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I spent my scattered free moments last week—walking through parking lots from one asphalt flower (as Shel Silverstein might say) to another—working on memorizing his poem. And, as it happened, the ongoing repetition of his images/comparisons, stumbling over his exact wording, and coming to appreciate the compactness the poem’s construction, led me to write “Evaluating Student Writing”:

I tell them an A paper
surprises and convinces me
and all the words are spelled right.
An ice pick, I paraphrase,
to break the frozen sea inside me.

I collect a jumbled pile of miscast cinderblocks
dissolving before they have a chance to set,
pistols with bent barrels and no firing pins,
a heart monitor missing a plug.

Then, the essay from a doughy girl
who wears a Ramones t-shirt,
or maybe The Who,
and sits alone at one side of the classroom.

Her only friend is the moon,
who she talks to every night.
She sneaks out of her mother’s house
to cry and laugh and rage with her friend.

She wakes up early in the morning
under the pecan tree in the back yard
with dew on her face to sneak back inside
before her mother wakes up.

I ask her to stay when class is over,
after the other papers are returned.
She asks if she is in trouble. Yes, I say,
because I wish I could have written this.
Because now you have to do it again.

This coming week? Next up in the poem chute is “Break” by Dorianne Laux.

Follow @markroylong