So THAT’S why you always point North.
and my pots and pans stick to me, yes.
When it comes to poetry, I infinitely prefer clever to profound. These days, profound is cheap but clever is refreshing.
Must… resist… urge… to post… limerick…
Teenage angst displayed
Disguised as crap politics
Principal was right.
Sports assemblies suck
What could make them even worse?
Vogon poetry!
That is seriously bad poetry.
The creator of such crap is the Laureate?
Are there literate people at your HS? That wouldn’t have made it out of the rough draft stage at my HS, but then again, that was back in the day when kids actually had to produce quality work to get accolades.
Did I just say that?
Write a letter to the editor. Don’t stoop to cheap shots. Explain your position and give support for them. SIGN your name to the letter.
And sit back and see what happens.
PS-I hated athletic assemblies, too. I wouldn’t have minded achievment assemblies so much but to watch a bunch of football players pose and smirk, while the cheerleaders pole danced around them was a waste of time for me.
Pff. Take a look at internet poetry sometime. All the glories of teen poetry, plus anonymity. It’ll make you grey before your time.
Not having read the poem, I can kind of guess why the administration said “no” to its performance.
In the not too distant past, I was in high school and assemblies have the potential to be a powder keg of student emotion. They’s usually at the end of the day on a Friday. The ENTIRE student body is there. Lots of kids would rather not be there. Most of the kids are pumped up. Many kids are feeling rebelious…reading a “politically charged” poem that was probably meant to evoke some strong feelings probably isn’t the best idea for this venue. One or two kids get worked up about it and suddenly you’ve got massive amounts of kids (and their hormones) flying off the handle, possibly trying to go after the poet or those who agree with the poet.
Weird shit happened in my senior year when one of my friends decided he wasn’t going to stand for the national anthem during an assembly. And that was just a tiny little statement from one dude, made quietly in the corner. Imagine if he had stood up with a microphone and said “fuck America!” Yeesh.
All that happened to us was the teachers got pissed.
I started out
On this fine day
To say Fuck The Man!
He is teh gay!
He squishes us
Under his thumb,
We’re High School Seniors,
We ain’t so dumb!
He wants to kill us
In his War.
Blow off our Head!
The Guts! The Gore!
We don’t need
His load of Crap.
I’ll catch you dudes
Later, At the Gap!
I don’t know, I’d say that in general our cultural paradigm follows a “more with the clever, less with the meaning” M.O. I’m at a point where I welcome profundity (am I using that correctly), even if it’s not the most strongly supported, because at least it tries to communicate something to me, and not just entertain with wit. Of course, combining the two is always a huge plus.
Anyway, as far as the OP goes, I feel similar to many others here. On the one hand, I completely agree that having to listen to what is most likely pretty piss-poor poetry being read by someone who thinks he/she is the greatest thing on Earth is not a great way to spend any amount of time. On the other hand, as someone who generally had to sit through many athletic-related events in high school, it always feels a good when I hear that students are being forced to pay attention to arts/math/academic pursuits for a little bit.
But yeah, smarty-pants poets suck, no matter what age they may be. I don’t know what it is about poetry that seems to keep people from critiquing work honestly. I think if folks were given more true criticism about their writing we would see a lot fewer hacks subjecting us to their drivel, as well as a lot of people who are stuck in poor habits actually, you know, get better at writing poetry.
I hereby nominate this poem for the Nobel Prize.
And if there isn’t a poetry category there, by golly, I’ll MAKE one.
There is a bizarre idea that poetry is all about feelings and souls and everyone can write a poem because everyone has feelings and souls and so on and so on.
I don’t know of any other art form that has this sort of persistent bs attached to it.
There are lots of internet forums where people try to teach the basics of poetry. As you can imagine, those people generally burn out fairly quickly and the sites often get overrun by the outpouring of someone’s heart and soul and essence and whatnot.
Apropos of not very much, I recently had the opportunity to retrieve a collection of my own high school newspapers that my mother had been keeping in the garage. I was on staff, and had a prominently featured opinion piece in almost every issue from those two years.
I wouldn’t punch myself in the face. I would kick myself in the nuts and drop myself down a well. I was simply insufferable.
Not like now, when you must all suffer me. 
Seriously, I think it’s just the age. Nobody has ever had a thought or opinion before, until a teenager thinks or believes it, at which time it’s the most important thing EVAR.
This too shall pass.
I always took a purse-sized popular science book to those. I couldn’t have cared less about the sports teams at my high school. I probably would have read during the poetry part, too, because I wasn’t (and am not) interested in that, either.
I finally told my school I wouldn’t go - I was there to learn, not to go to pep rallies. They let me go to the library instead. I think they didn’t want an “issue” and I had reached the point where I had started to make “issues.”
But I sort of agree. Bad poetry is horrible indeed, but I don’t see how it is better or worse than bad songs played by the pep band, bad dances done by danceline, and the cheering of a bad football team. The poets may not be Robert Frost, but the football players aren’t Jim Thorpe. If we are going to encourage athletic fantasies, we might as well encourage the intellectual posers as well. And I wish schools would encourage students to talk, think and write about controversy.
Iraqi POWS or high school students at a pep rally?
The halls are empty now
Like the hallways in a jail
The emptiness - a quiet roar.
Prisoners of an institution
Forced to watch the circus show.
They wait.
For someone.
To rescue them.
But their captors will not let go
until their time is up.
Dude, that is like, so sweet!!! U R teh gratest poet! It’s like, we’re prisoners of the maan, just like the Iraqi POWs. Everybody in the world should get stoned and read this poem and then we’d totally have world peace.
As a spotty and angst-ridden teen
Hear me publically vent my young spleen
While we kill for oil
And poison the soil
My folks are, like, totally mean.