Slam+Poetry

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By: Taylor Mali
A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers, tied up with canvas straps - like classical music's birthday gift to the insane - is gently nudged without its legs out an eighth-floor window on 62nd street. It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers' crane, Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares and dirty white crisscross patterns hanging like the second-to-last note of a concerto played on the edge of the seat, the edge of tears, the edge of eight stories up going over, and I'm trying to teach math in the building across the street. Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned? All the greatest common factors are delivered by long-necked cranes and flatbed trucks or come through everything, even air. Like snow. See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year my students rush to the window as if snow were more interesting than math, which, of course, it is. So please. Let me teach like a Steinway, spinning slowly in April air, so almost-falling, so hinderingly dangling from the neck of the movers' crane. So on the edge of losing everything. Let me teach like the first snow, falling.

In this poem Taylor Mali is trying to get the attention from his students so he can teach math, but in the snow and the crane holding the piano seem to caught his students attention. Bit of prose which reflects a teacher’s wish to be able to teach in as interesting a manner as the first snow of the year or the strange events that can occur out the window of a schooling. I choose this slam poetry, because slam poetry is a very specialized form of public speaking and I think that there is much I can learn from this poem by Taylor Mali. He know when to pause for effect, he is passionate of his subject and he uses simple but effective gestures, like for example, when talking about the crane holding the piano. I think this poem tells me that how much effort that every teacher put into their class, even thought that sometime the teaching are boring, but the teachers tried their best to make it interesting.