[Your Social Class Has Piano Lessons as a Feature of Childhood]

A new poem by Aaron Kunin.

Your social class has piano lessons as a feature of childhood.

And the lessons are meaningful.

They teach you about inequality.

Because piano lessons are a privilege of your class.

Why piano? I am sure you did not choose piano.

It is an impressive movable good: piano.

An heirloom: piano. A place to store your wealth.

And because skill at piano isn’t determined only by class.

If you practice, if you have decent teachers, you can get better at piano.

And there are levels of skill that can be attained, with practice, only by a few; for the rest of us, practice will not avail, lessons will not avail.

I was a child with this privilege. I could have gone further and learned more (I did not reach the limit of what I could have learned) but I could not have learned to play piano for an audience.

But piano lessons reveal their meaning only when people hear the difference between levels of skill.

Piano lessons are wasted if no one knows how the sounds of the piano ought to feel.

Ross, do you know this?

You want to say that Stevie Wonder’s albums from the early 1970s are “among the finest stretches of artistic production in history.”

In this you’re doing your job: finding resources for art in the music of the past.

You also want to say that “anytime someone says something stupidly categorical like that I always think what an asshole and stop listening.”

Because you are an ambitious poet, you can’t help making judgments.

Because your judgments interfere with other people’s ambitions, you can’t help feeling there is something wrong with judging.

Something unseemly, something insulting.

You said that you “give almost nary a shit” about the fact that people hate poetry. That can’t be right.

Because you wrote an essay about it.

Because you were replying to an essay by Ben, your contemporary, with whom you have been competing.

Because, you said, “I live in a Midwestern college town where once a month the line into the poetry slam at a bar actually wraps around the block and inside all variety of people share their poems to an audience of a couple hundred.”

You want poems to do something like the kick step in House Party.

You want to celebrate the dance and your skill in imitating it for the talent show in ninth grade.

You want to say you won with the kick step, but you want to say the school was right not to declare a winner.

“I agree with the middle school pedagogy,” you said.

No. That can’t be right.

If they don’t declare a winner, people aren’t looking at the same object.

They don’t see the kick step.

They don’t know what they are looking at.

The dancers know this in House Party.

Because the scene where they demonstrate the kick step has a tournament format.

—Now. This is very complicated.
—What are you doing?
—This ain’t aerobics class!
—You can’t do it!
—Is that a challenge?
—I think it is.
—You better come on out here.
—Come on, come on.

At the poetry slam, they know this.

Because they declare a winner.

That’s why the event is called a slam: they are fighting to sort out which poem is best, or at least which performance is best.

Stevie Wonder knows this. He knows how a song should feel.

“Just because a record has a groove,” Stevie Wonder sings, “don’t make it in the groove.”

“Time will not allow us to forget,” he sings, “Basie, Miller, Satchmo, / And the king of all, Sir Duke.”

Shakespeare knew this. He was a member of a society where whole classes of people wrote short poems.

Ariana, do you know this?

“I read the sonnets,” you said, “of Shakespeare today. Not all of them are great.”

This much is true: great sonnets are in short supply, even in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

The great ones depend on the less great ones. And the reverse.

Because they are watching each other and competing with each other.

That’s sweet.

It’s suitable for a talented poet to challenge Shakespeare. To try to invent more interesting solutions than Shakespeare found in the sonnet form.

Don’t use what Shakespeare left unachieved to justify your commitment to dissolute living!