{"id":245,"date":"2006-02-21T11:06:18","date_gmt":"2006-02-21T17:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/?p=245"},"modified":"2006-02-21T22:12:54","modified_gmt":"2006-02-22T04:12:54","slug":"writers-almanac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/21\/writers-almanac\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer’s Almanac"},"content":{"rendered":"

For years I have listened to Writer’s Almanac<\/a> on NPR<\/a>. Today, as I dropped my son off at school, I remembered a particularly striking poem that was featured on one of their segments. It appeared in my life right around the same time certain people in our lives (mostly our well intentioned family who have always had stability and a standard structure to their livlihood) were nothing short of terrified about how we were surviving. Both my husband and I are artists and we really traipsed through the “starving artist” bit for about a year \u2014 truthfully, we are just pulling out of it. When I heard this poem, though, I wanted all the world to be hearing it with me.<\/p>\n

Poem:<\/strong> “You Go to School to Learn” by Thomas Lux<\/a> from New & Selected Poems<\/a><\/em> \u00a9 Houghton Mifflin.<\/p>\n

\n

You Go to School to Learn<\/h2>\n

You go to school to learn to
\nread and add, to someday
\nmake some money. It\u2014money\u2014makes
\nsense: you need
\na better tractor, an addition
\nto the gameroom, you prefer
\nto buy your beancurd by the barrel.
\nThere’s no other way to get the goods
\nyou need. Besides, it keeps people busy
\nworking\u2014for it.
\nIt’s sensible and, therefore, you go
\nto school to learn (and the teacher,
\nhaving learned, gets paid to teach you) how
\nto get it. Fine. But:
\nyou’re taught away from poetry
\nor, say, dancing (That’s nice, dear,<\/em>
\nbut there’s no dough in it<\/em>). No poem
\never bought a hamburger, or not too many. It’s true,
\nand so, every morning\u2014it’s still dark!\u2014
\nyou see them, the children, like angels
\nbeing marched off to execution,
\nor banks. Their bodies luminous
\nin headlights. Going to school.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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