The Student Theme

Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.

from The Uses of Adversity, 1998
University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA

Grammar

Tony Hoagland


Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

from Donkey Gospel, 1998
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.

i live in music

ntozake shange


i live in music
is this where you live? 

i live here in music 

i live on c# street 

my friend lives on b-flat avenue 

do you live here in music 

sound 

falls round me like rain on other folks 

saxophones wet my face 

cold as winter in st. louis 

hot like peppers i rub on my lips 

thinkin they waz lilies
i got 15 trumpets where other women got hips 

& a upright bass for both sides of my heart 

i walk round in a piano like somebody 

else be walkin on the earth
i live in music 

live in it 

wash in it 

i cd even smell it 

wear sound on my fingers 

sound falls so fulla music 

ya cd make a river where yr arm is &
hold yrself 

hold yrself in a music

Shange, Ntozake and Romare Bearden. I Live in Music. New York: 
Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1994.

The Grammar Lesson

Steve Kowit


A noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.
An adjective is what describes the noun.
In "The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"

of and with are prepositions. The's
an article, a can's a noun,
a noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.

A can can roll - or not. What isn't was
or might be, might meaning not yet known.
"Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"

is present tense. While words like our and us
are pronouns - i.e. it is moldy, they are icky brown.
A noun's a thing; a verb's the thing it does.

Is is a helping verb. It helps because
filled isn't a full verb. Can's what our owns
in "Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz."

See? There's almost nothing to it. Just
memorize these rules...or write them down!
A noun's a thing, a verb's the thing it does.
The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz.