Poetry and Composition

Here is a poem I wrote for my class ENG 692 The Teaching of Writing. We had to respond creatively to an essay by a woman named Brooke Horvath which investigated issues of responding and assessing students writing. It was a strange topic for me to write a poem on for sure, and I have never responded to a critical essay in verse. Don't know if it will be too esoteric. Give it a go.

To the heavy clouds of marginalia remarks
(bleed your rain-thoughts off of the page)

Seep back into the earth and remind us we are listeners,
the students suspended between what has been spoken
and what utterances are patiently awaiting their life.
We are the audience of the planet’s ongoing processes,
and are made up of a sequence of objectives,
(carbon chain, DNA) written all over ourselves step by step.
Paper is thin, vulnerable to the elements,
even from which it comes, wood and water.

Paper lets light through:
add ink and voice and our errors are a beautiful
part of it all, the age rings of wisdom growing.
We are finding the text in ourselves, making patterns
with our ideas, and redesigning our language
time after time.
Those voices are drawn in blacks and blues,
our tiny signatures ensuring our existence
which is evaluated, examined and experienced;
those roles must be ever changing.

Catching droplets of comments, we feel the weight
of them in our hands, and throw them back at the sky.
We are transcending the context in which they had
first appeared to us, and watching them in new angles,
they land back on earth in different shapes.