Al Ortolani’s Hansel & Gretel Get the Word on the Street, a Rattle Chapbook, is poetry of the classroom, told from the teacher’s vantage point. More specifically, it’s the vantage point of high school and middle school teacher. (Bless the teachers who can handle middle schoolers: they’re terrifying in groups.) It varies from tender and charming and funny to sometimes eye-rolling, and it dropped me right into teacher mode once more. (Is that a good thing? Probably not, but I enjoyed reading it anyway!)
Ortolani covers the bizarre and occasionally hilarious hijinks of middle schoolers in poems like “Seventh Grade Communication Arts,” where
For 50 cents the girl throws / herself across the hallway / and slams her head into the bathroom door. / She uses the money to buy candy / at the 7-Eleven across from school.
Did I laugh like a goddamn hyena when I read those lines? You bet I did! I’ve known that kid! I’ve tried to chase that kid down before they could do their stupid trick! I’ve failed every time! And I laugh, because it’s horrifying but also hilarious, and God, somehow most of us seem to have survived being a seventh-grader, although I’m not entirely sure how. (I was suicidally depressed myself, and let’s face it: a lot is better than a suicidal kid.)
“Parts of Hansel & Gretel Get the Word on the Street are incredibly sad, including “A Lesson About the Bonks,” about the kids whose parents bounce them from district to district “Parts of Hansel & Gretel Get the Word on the Street are incredibly sad: “A Lesson About the Bonks,” about the kids whose parents bounce them from district to district “just ahead of the bill collectors.” But overall, this is not a book of sadness, unless it is the melancholy that comes of watching students come and go.
Do I agree with everything in here? Hell no! But I enjoy the text, and its nods and winks and nudges at education and educators, very, very much. I think it might be poetry specific to those of us who’ve taught, and my God, it does its job well.
Essentially a Nerd 