The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.
— Diane di Prima
It’s an evil day when there’s no coffee in the teachers’ lounge at 8 A.M. and it’s so cold outside I could see my breath in the parking lot on the way in. I’m a poetry teacher, and this morning I’ll be visiting two fourth-grade classes. I’ve brought with me a poem called “Sweet like a Crow,” by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient. Here are a few lines:
It’s a perfect poem for teaching about simile and metaphor, though I had to cut any references to breasts or genitals or lovemaking and edit out an opening epigram that gave the poem a political slant. I didn’t like doing it, but years of teaching poetry in elementary schools have taught me to child-proof a poem as efficiently as a butcher guts a chicken.
