Discussion on Poetry at a Bar.

The other week at the student bar I ran into this (older) (black) (female) neighborhood music teacher I know.

She's trying to read more poetry though she doesn't like it, and I was like, "Yeah, I don't like poetry that much, but, you know, some people really get turned on by it and you can tell when they talk about it, and whenever I see that, I'm like, 'I should get me some of that!'".

At that, she began laughing and was like, "Yeah, exactly!!!!!!!!!!".

That also made me think of a story that I haven't thought of in absolute years, about how I encountered this poem on the SAT II and was so moved by it that I wrote the standardized testing company to see what the poem was and who wrote it (you have to remember, this was pre-internet).

As it turns out, it was the Gwendolyn Brooks poem "Piano After War".

When I told this to the neighborhood music teacher, first of all, she was thrilled, b/c she plays piano.

Even more, though, she was surprised that they actually wrote back.

"They wrote back?", she was like.

When I affirmed that yes, they had indeed wrote back, she was like, "That's crazy, and you crazy."

. . .

...yet another time a (black) woman has told me "you crazy" (something I've been told before at least several times)...