A lifetime ago, back in seventh-grade band,
“The Bullwhip” had all us kids pledge to expand
Our goals for our music.  He went on to ask us
To double our time spent in personal practice.
The girls—mostly woodwinds—were eager to please;
Ol’ Bullwhip could always control them with ease.
We boys on the trumpets and trombones, however,
Were harder to handle—we thought we were clever.
We readily signed when the sheet came around—
Exploited a loophole that one of us found.
Response to the ask had just turned on a dime,
And some even wrote that they’d triple their time!
Now no one could say that we out and out lied.
A math rule we’d learned was defense on our side:
Go multiply zero as much as you will—
The answer you come to remains zero still.

*****

William Walters “This poem tells a true story about an early class with our respected and beloved school band director, a colorful character who wore cowboy boots and carried a bullwhip around on his hip and actually went by the nickname “Bullwhip.”  A remarkable educator, he managed to be strict and demanding and patient and caring and encouraging all at the same time and, by our high school years, had us rural Southwest Kansas kids whipped into shape—figuratively, not literally—and disciplined to be an excellent marching band that competed very well against the big schools from Wichita, Topeka, Kansas City, and the like when we travelled back east for contests.  We had only about 170 students total in our high school, and we always had over 80 in the band!  Bullwhip certainly knew how to run a music program, and he gave our sleepy little town something to be proud of!     

“As far as the meter of the poem is concerned—it’s technically some kind of hendecasyllabic meter with hypercatalexis in a couple of the distichs.  But I didn’t really think much about rigid adherence to any form; I just went with what seemed to flow and what sounded good to me.”

‘Interdisciplinary Indiscipline’ was first published in Allegro.

William Walters has been a professor of English and linguistics at Rock Valley College, in Rockford, Illinois, for the past thirty-seven years.  He played trombone in many music groups in high school and college, and he’s a bass trombonist in a college/community band even now.

Photo: “Enterprise Middle School band plays for White Bluffs Center Tea Party” by Scott Butner is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.