One time in 7th grade, we had to write patriotic poems for Veterans' Day. Now, 7th grade was right about when I realized after three years of gross underachievement that I would never be a good student, so I decided to just make people around me as miserable as I was, you know, just to keep my head, and ace enough tests to keep myself from failing outright. This was 1998, remember, so taking the piss with America-as-abstract-concept wasn't yet punishable by decapitation. So for this poetry assignment, I decided I would just make a really shitty concrete/acrostic combo, the great crutch of every mediocre mind in a poetry unit, wherein each stripe of the flag would be a line starting with a letter in AMERICA and then there was some little text box for the canton in the upper-left. I did this all in Quark XPress, so it was all very professionally done. The lines were really ridiculous, like
Man, this is a great country,
and the one I still remember,
Every war, we win, Vietnam excluded.
So I banged this piece of crap out, had a few yuks to myself about how seriously I didn't take this, and then went back to doing whatever the hell else I thought was more important than my education in November 1998, which I'm guessing would've been watching Monday Night Raw, playing Final Fantasy VII, or some combination thereof (making Barrett Wallace in create-a-wrestler so we could determine once and for all who was tougher, him or Gangrel).
Imagine my surprise when I not only got an A on this assignment, but was told that my teacher had nominated it for some sort of Young Poets Of America anthology, which would publish this masterpiece contingent on my purchase of the anthology. It was like $12 or something, and my parents insisted that I buy it as some sort of keepsake. So yes, I bought it, and there amidst all sorts of mawkish middle schooler poetry, was my acrostic bullshit
Really glad to live here and not Canada I probably couldn't ask for a better flag.
So the moral of this story is that I am a published poet in the same sense that Larry is a baseball prospect.
_________________ Molly Lambert wrote: The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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