Finally — really, finally; I’ve been posting too much today — two more entries from the Embarrassing Early Josh files. I had lunch with an old teacher Saturday. She taught me from second to fifth grade, and she dug out an old class newsletter from 1983, in which we students had to write little poems or one-paragraph essays. Here are my two poems:
Computers
Black and colorful
Goto 100, Run, Print, Gosub
Take over the world
Robots
Commentary: The author was learning BASIC on a then-cutting-edge TRS-80 — hence the programming lingo in line 3. The inherent contradiction of “black and colorful” evokes the classic semiotic phrase “colorless green ideas ideas sleep furiously” (itself hijacked for the sidebar of salmon’s site). The sudden evocation of robots taking over the world brings us to Yeatsian territory. In all, a stirring early work.
We’ve had 40 presidents,
And they’ve all been great
But some were like Taft,
They ate, and ate, and ate!!!!
Washington wasn’t the first
president, believe it or not.
The first president of the
colonies was: John Hancock!!!!
Commentary: Clearly the author is trying to attract attention through his liberal use of exclamation points — perhaps more exclamation points than he has used in the 19 years since. The reference to William Howard Taft could be construed as a prediction that the author would end up attending Taft’s alma mater, or that he would, in 1998, cover the Ohio gubernatorial campaign of Taft’s grandson Bob. Alternately, it could be a prediction that the author would some day weigh 340 pounds. One hopes not. The blanket support for all presidents would not last long — roughly six years, until he got a subscription to The Nation. The author is also in error in line 8: it was John Hanson, not not the floridly-signing John Hancock who deserved the rightful title. But the poem loses none of its power because of the error.