Shoe by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly for September 19, 2019

I remember a teacher actually trying to teach us that crime ultimately didn’t pay, when I was in the 9th grade. Funniest thing we’d heard all year.

Try again.

Employment

A rose by any other name is not as sweet as the next test question.

Work ?

Ask a bunch of contractors in NYC who doesn’t pay and I bet one name keeps coming up.

Well, he’s not wrong.

Uh, I believe the word you’re looking for is “Crime”.

Poets are born and not paid.

That’s more true than the actual answer.

More broadly, ‘an English major’.

Who is Ben L?? Inquiring minds want to know!

Q: What did the English major say to the engineering major?

Tell me about it, I have over a hundred published – if I wrote them hoping for money I’d have quit at two.

The word definitely isn’t ‘politics’.

Am getting back into poetry. Hated it when I was in college because of all the scanning and rhyme scheme nonsense. . .and trying to figure out what some of more obscure poems meant. I have a wonderful poem from the Christian Science Monitor that was a couple of pages long: it was a history of roses told as British history. Very clever. . .

This is why I quit writing “fill in the blank” type tests… too open to interpretation. Almost easier to grade essays.

From what I hear, the word Skylar should have used is “ teaching” .

Truer words were never spoken, Skyler.

Teaching high school English.

So so many correct answers.

Aah, the true reason for Sylvia Plath’s demise.

It’s very difficult to make any of the arts “pay.” Painters, sculptors, musicians (either composers or performers), writers (prosaic or poetic), dramatists (writers or actors), any medium you wish to name, all struggle and only a very few can actually make a living at it. But there’s the rub; they do it because they have to. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King replied to the question of why he did what he did with the succinct reply of “Why do you assume I have a choice?”

Crime does pay……ask those who work in corrections…..doesn’t pay much though.

If you live in New York it pays big time

Ben L. = Ben Lerner maybe? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ben-lerner