Date: 19 Mar 1972
Class: English 9
Practice teacher:
Miss Hatch
Student evaluator:
Timothy

I think y ou had
the right Idear
but poetry
isn’t my bag.
If you won’t let
me be a soldier
I’ll hav e to cut.
Or I’ll disrupt
your class. You was
always watching
me. Don’t worry
I’m going to sit here
with Josephs
big black gloves on
and I Won’t bring
my pencil or
vocabulary.

—dotty seiter

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Notes about poem and art:
• Looking through old files for something I never did locate, I bumped into “Timothy,” a poem I wrote and manually typed onto Eaton’s Corrasable Bond paper in 1972. I based it on what a ninth grade boy attending Norwich Free Academy in Connecticut wrote by way of evaluating my student teaching. I’ve replaced the original title with contextual headers here. The poem itself I left almost entirely untouched, wanting to preserve its blend of Timothy’s raw perspective and my making a poem of it back in the day. What a gift to step into this inner space of memory, recalling both Timothy and my 22-year-old teaching-and-writing-poetry self.
• Slow linework soothes me. While drawing A Higher Wisdom I was able to locate myself in an inner space of grounded, calm, uncharged neutrality from which to watch my thoughts drift by.