Marty's 2005 poem

(recited at the Live and Learn conference in St. Louis)

On Jan 15, 2006, at 1:02 AM, queenjane555 wrote:

I was so impressed with Marty when i saw him at the L&L conference in October...i didnt even meet the kid, and could tell he was just a great, shining, happy guy! I really liked his whole poem-reciting cowboy thing too....

Yeah...
That poem was designed to embarrass me. He had intended to do more trick-gun stuff, and has a long two-gun routine (those are toy guns from WalMart that he modifies a little bit), but changed his plan just before we went and wrote a poem:

My mom made me write this
A bad poem by Marty Dodd
My mom made me write this
One hundred words no less
I didn’t want to do this
But I’ll give it my bess
She cut my hair like this
That was last year I guess
I was going to do gun tricks
But I’m not so here’s less
A bad poem from me
A bad poem for thee
Ok I’ve used “thee” that makes me a poet I guess
We drove here from New Mexico
It’s just north of Mexico just so you know
We passed by some Texicos
Can not think of other exicos so I’ll end it there

OF COURSE... I didn't make him write it. But the important thing for him was it had one hundred words, no more. It was the first time he had ever counted words. I remember a standing assignment in 8th grade, write 150 words every day. I started to get within ten words of that by the size of my writing and where I ended up on the second side of the page.

If I were in a position of needing to categorize that, I would've called it poetry and writing and geography, but it wasn't any of that. It was humor and performance art.

Thanks for the kind words about Marty, though. I really enjoy being around him.

Sandra

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