I attend a large, urban, public high school. It is a generally diversely populated school, but infamous for being extremely cliquish. Anyway, we have a teacher who, a few years ago, took it upon himself to start naming Poets Laureate and Cum Laude. Ever since I’ve been here, these kids have been the most obnoxious, wanna-be political, stuck-up people I’ve ever seen.
So anyway, our school has sports assemblies twice a year, to showcase and honor the participants in that semester’s sports. One of these was last friday. So these poets have somehow whined and moaned their ways into being allowed to perform poems at these assemblies. Now, to be clear, these are COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT poems, have nothing to do with sports or anything at all, it just seems like these people are so desperate to express themselves that they’ll do it at any opportunity. So we all sit politely and listen to the poems, but it’s clear that very few people want to listen to them.
But at this recent assembly two of the poets walked up to the podium and said “Insufferably Pretentious Poet (not his real name) wrote a poem, but the ADMINISTRATION deemed it POLITICALLY CONTROVERSIAL so he was BANNED from performing it” (emphasis theirs). Everyone seemed pretty confused by this, but we all sorta let it go.
The next day, poet-appointing teacher’s quarterly arts paper came out. On the back was a poem, under the heading “deemed ‘politically controversial’”. This was… exactly the type of political poem you would expect a high school student to write. It was long, with poor structure, crappy attempts at rhyming, filled with random references, and the political content was cliched and boring. It was absolutely AWFUL. I can find it and type it up if you guys want. But anyway, so there was this uproar, I thought the whole thing was pretty stupid. It was a crappy poem, and actually was politically controversial, and thus unfit to be performed in front of an unwilling student body assembled for other purposes.
About a week later, after all the crap had died down, the normal student newspaper came out. In it, there was an article, written by a Poet Laureate who was also on the news staff, about the poem, in which the poem was printed. The article read as a scathing criticism of the administration for censoring this poem, as if they were stepping on this kids rights by not allowing him to vomit his contrived political opinions all over an unwilling student body.
These kinds of kids make me so angry. He thinks he’s fighting the power, raging against the machine or whatever. Does anyone else see the BS in what this kid is doing?
I guess this isn’t really a normal pitting, just a strong rant.
