When I was 14…
I showed this video to my class a few weeks ago, we’re looking at poetry, trying to answer the question, What is poetry, anyway? Not the deepest of questions but it is, quite simply, asking them to think about everything that poetry is and could be. We started with free verse.
When I was 14 by Dawn Saylor
The boys were silent about it (they may have been asleep, but still…). The girls were … agitated.
That’s ridiculous.
Is she a prostitute or something?
She must be a prostitute and she is talking about her pimp.
That’s disgusting.
I’m still thinking about their reactions. The phrase she who doth protest too much comes to mind. Could it have hit too close to home? Or is it far off the mark?
What do you think?
On a side note, I just did a google search for ‘girls’ to find an image for this post. The first 13 images that came up were of scantily clad women followed by 1 image of girls in a school uniform, followed by some more of what it started with. Here is what I could find that was…appropriate.
girl sitting on a tree stump by somebox on flickr. Click image for source.
I think I’m going to work the poem back in to a lesson in the near future and see what happens.