Poetry in Motion

Since my old employer took back my company-issued laptop a few weeks ago, I've been spending more time with my own relatively ancient computer. One of the files archived on it that I stumbled onto lately is a poem Jack wrote for one of our high school English classes. For a couple of days the district sent in a "resident poet" of some kind who gave us an assignment on sensory imagery. We were told to bring in a piece of fruit and then draft a poem in class (free verse, of course -- no constraints of rhyme or meter here) describing how the fruit looked, smelled, tasted, etc., which we revised that night as homework. Anyway, Jack, having brought an apple to class, turned in a printed copy of the following piece with more or less the same formatting and coloration:

APPLE

Apple sits in front of me,
Mottled red simplicity
That hearkens mind as well as tongue
To ponder on its purity

Ripened in an orchard green
Back where the crowds are seldom seen,
It came of age thus undisturbed
In wondrous beauty, yet pristine

(Though, alas, I only guess –
I saw it first at Food - 4 - Less,
And thus, the history of Apple
Can’t be known - but I digress)

Apple stands before me now;
My thoughts bestow some praise - See how
The rustic beauty complements
Its rich outdoorsy flavor… wow.

Texture soft, and touch just cool
Enough to soothe; forever true
Will be my memories preserved
Of Apple, that I brought to school.

[Footnote: Food-4-Less is, or was, a grocery store about a quarter mile down the road from our high school.]

Unbelievably, the resident poet commented to Jack with an utter absence of irony that she thought his poem was very strong, but didn't he feel like its formal structure limited his self-expression? My own semi-serious effort, which I don't seem to have saved a soft copy of, described a tomato -- a subject that seemed a little subversive to me, since I had to take a bite out of the thing at my desk for the sake of sensory observation and who eats a raw tomato? -- and read like a clumsy imitation of a poor, utilitarian prose translation of something by Yevtushenko. (That's exactly what it was, in fact, since the only poetry I had been exposed to around that time came from the liner notes of my CD of Shostakovich's 13th symphony.) I respected Jack's poem a lot more: Not only was it better at being what it tried to be, but he managed to undermine the whole purpose of the exercise, even more than the other uninterested kids who, you know, just didn't put in any effort. Even after majoring in the stuff in college it's still one of the more successful student poems I've read.