Oda

"Oda a Los Calcetines"

I have blogged about this poem before, but last time it was in despair, now I have a message of hope.

When I began this process I struggled over the memorization. I had a mere two weeks to get this poem presentable. It had been nearly a week and I was barely halfway through the poem. But I kept on trying, knowing that I had a responsibility as a poet to do this poem justice. Soon I had the poem memorized, and recited to my teacher. She handed me back my poem, with numerous words highlighted. I have always thought I have excellent Spanish pronunciation, but I was ignoring accents, accenting the wrong syllables, and pronouncing "z"s with the English sound, instead of the "s" Spanish pronunciation. How could I have gone through four years of Spanish not saying "sapatos"?

But again I pushed forward, and corrected my mistakes, and soon had the poem memorized with the correct pronunciation. On Tuesday after school, I performed the poem for my teacher and one other teacher. I appreciated the slightly larger audience, and the other teacher gave me some good advice on pacing. By this point I was brimming with confidence. I did the poem perfectly when walking to and from school, and so on Wednesday I performed it for my Spanish class.

I rocked it. I owned the class. All the other's reciting poetry were boring, and barely had it memorized. I don't mean to be mean, but they only had fifty words, while I had 200. I had fifty words of my poem in the first two days. I was doing excellently, but then I got near the end, and my mind went blank. What was the next line? It was in my head, but I couldn't get it to come out of my mouth. My teacher refused to prompt me, because they wouldn't at the language fair. I thought for a bit and repeated some lines, and soon figured it out and was on my way. I finished the poem, and was complimented but I felt like I had failed.

I took a look at the stanza that I couldn't remember and figured out why it refused to come into my mind. I didn't know why it was there. It made no sense why the poet would have put in those lines. So I read the English translation, and figured it out. Not only did it help me to get it memorized, but it also improved the quality of the performance.

The next day in class I recited it, and this time I really rocked it. I went all the way through without messing up. I was still pronouncing the z wrong in one of the words, but it was minor. I'm working on fixing it as we speak. That afternoon I met at my teacher's classroom to practice some more. She asked if I wanted an audience again, and I said "sure, if you can round one up"

Five minutes later she returned with nine or ten teachers, and the principal. Most of these teachers knew little to no Spanish. But they seemed to enjoy themselves. They could tell it was a good recitation. After I finished, one of the teacher came up to me and asked me about the poem. It had already been mentioned that the title was "Ode to my Socks" this is our conversation.

Her: "So did he like his socks or not?"
Me: "He liked his socks, but his feet were bad, compared to the socks, his feet paracieron inaceptables, they seemed unacceptable."

I never intended to use the Spanish from the poem, but that was the easiest and most natural way to describe it. I am beginning to think in Spanish. Thus is the power of poetry. I wish I had got the chance to do this as a beginner to the language.

Today I am doing the poem for another of my teacher's classes. I'm not worried. Then the language fair is tomorrow. This should be fun.

Today's cookie goes to the person who can tell me who wrote this poem.