Philip Larkin "This Be the Verse"
School, with all its best intentions, fucks you up.
Teachers with their red marking pens and corporate casual
clothing, they fuck you up too. They want you to think
critically, but not enough to increase their hourly wages.
But they were fucked up by their own system's standards.
By sandwich makers in spring themed one pieces. Who
half the time were looking for husbands and faking smiles.
Man hands mediocrity to man and it spreads like
southern wildfire. Drop out as soon as you can and
self satiate an honest thirst for knowledge.
(for some strange reason this did not post the first time?)
ReplyDeleteLarkin gave you a great topic. School really does seem fucked up after reading this piece and I love it. I think perhaps the next step is, however, to remove your work from Larkin's format. It falls very formulaic into what he had already done and as a result goes in direct comparison. Now, one can say the point of improv is to work off another poet's piece, and that's true, but one must also recognize the strength's in that other poet's piece and walk away with some skill set they discovered in it. I think Larkin gave you an eye towards the irony, now you just need to abandon his set up and run with it.
Other than the sound of it, I'm not much for the word "fuck" in poetry, even in Larkin's piece. I think it pumps the work with an artificial electricity. I would argue that underneath this excitement, Larkin performs something really subtle and interesting, almost creates a sort of pity towards the parents, and following Larkin's stanzas I see an attempt at that same emotional evocation but it gets muddled.
The transition from the third to fourth line falls flat to the potential enjambments you could have developed. As a reader I expected with such an odd line break for the next line to hold something perhaps condescending to the idea of thought, or anything more contrasting. There also seems to be too much push for substance in the fourth line by incorporating a teacher's wages and it does not fit into the line well--no amount of thinking will affect a teacher's salary and it's hard to think a teacher would not want a student to think above their wage line.
I'm not sure about calling women, "sandwich makers." It seemed odd the first time I read this. Perhaps just say women and then move on into some more of that great description.
Mediocrity is too syllabic. As far as line breaks go, some of the strong line breaks the piece had before slips in the last stanza, with words "like" and "and" being the breaks. Does "honest" in the last line serve the strongest for you there?
Continue talking about teachers. I think you can even incorporate older teachers in this as opposed to including women. Consider teachers like Socrates or Plato (Plato is a rant in the name of poetry waiting to happen) or if you want to include women, how about dabbling in how women weren't allowed in the educational system for a long time? That's fucked up. By making this new comparison I think you can come up with an even better ending stanza. Hope this helps.