What my poetry students don’t know
- Jul 14
- 1 min read
By Matt Dube
When I asked them how to shred
a carrot, one proposed tying it
to Mick Jagger’s guitar strings so that
his playing would shred it. They don’t know
Bobby’s Eddie Cheddar joke from King
of the Hill. See also the desire to make this
a list poem, or to dunk on my students.
They don’t know. Some of them
caught in the poetry trap. Listening
set them free. They write what they don’t
know on a grain of rice. What my poetry
students don’t know is the cold comfort
one can find in poetry. The light sting of
grounding for doing what you thought
was right. They’re lucky to know. My father
widowed, washed up in his hometown after
decades away, found the dirty gerund
poetry society on Sunday nights a refuge
for being who he was just then. Tied himself
to the mast like Odysseus and let it sing
to him. How certainty slipped away the more
he reached into it, a bottomless bag that remains
full after he emptied. There was more.
He’s the one who ran out. That’s what I want
my students to know.
Matt Dube teaches creative writing and American lit at a small mid-Missouri university, and reads submissions for JackLeg Press. His poems have appeared in Pictura, Lenticular Lit, Last Stanza, and elsewhere.
