Cuyahoga County - Public Library

READ A POEM

In Vac’s Class

(at Mary M. Bethune Elementary)

by Kenyette Adrine-Robinson
 
I watched
the female
5th grade
students fanning
like church
goin' sisters
 
on a hot
Sunday after-
noon while
the teacher
was preachin'
up a sermon
about WWII
 
90 degrees
in Cleveland &
it ain't
hardly June
 
Fannin’ thru
Germany, Italy
& Austria too
 
Back to America
& onward w/
the bomb
which ended WWII
 
“In Vac’s Class” by Kenyette Adrine-Robinson, from The Ghetto in Me. Kenyette Productions, 1994. Used by permission of the author.
 
Kenyette Adrine-Robinson is a native Clevelander who served in the Women’s Army Corps from 1969 to 1971 and then went on to earn a BA and an MEd from Kent State University, where she served as an instructor of Pan-African Studies. She has traveled throughout North America, Liberia, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, St. Lucia and much of Europe, always with pencil and paper in hand. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies, such as Sparking and Adam of Ifé, and in many journals, such as Shelley’s, New Kent Quarterly and Callalo. Her poetry has also appeared in two poetry collections, The Ghetto in Me and Be My Shoo-gar.
 

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WRITE A POEM

Use a dictionary for this exercise from the Oulipians, a group of French writers famous for setting up constraints to write within: take a poem and replace each noun in it with the 7th word following it in the dictionary. If it doesn’t work, try the 14th word or the 21st.

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