On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance

“On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” is from Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s fourth collection of poems, Oceanic, which was published in 2018. It is a contemporary free-form poem of 23 lines that details a teacher mispronouncing a student’s name. This leads to the student trying to cope with the embarrassment of the other students staring at her and regarding her as different. The poem is typical of many of Nezhukumatathil’s poems that center on emotional concerns and childhood memory, often having broader social implications. The poem also employs two hallmarks of Nezhukumatathil’s writing: scientific metaphor and rich descriptive language.

While it has yet to be named a movement, Nezhukumatathil is part of a group of contemporary American writers such as Ross Gay, Katherine Larson, and Ada Limón who use natural metaphor to comment on the world around them, although each poet does so in varying degrees. Personal situations are layered in these poems with scientific or natural phenomenon, creating a connection to the larger landscape. This helps specify the personal experience while allowing the poem to remain universal to its audience. Nezhukumatathil also identifies as an Asian-American writer and is also noted for her environmental essay writing.

Poet Biography

Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born on December 23, 1974, in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother is Filipina and her father is Malayali (from Southwest India). She has one younger sister. As Nezhukumatathil told Ross Gay in an interview with Poets & Writers, her family “moved around quite a bit [… living] in Chicago, Iowa, Arizona, Kansas, New York, and Ohio and [she] was often a new kid, often in mostly white schools” (Gay, Ross. “World of Wonders: An Interview With Aimee Nezhukumatathil.” Poets & Writers, Sept./Oct. 2020). Nezhukumatathil credits her parents, both avid gardeners, with helping her cultivate her sense of wonder and joy regarding the natural world, which established her lifelong fascination with science and the environment.

As an undergraduate, Nezhukumatathil attended The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio where she earned her bachelor of arts degree in English. She continued her graduate studies there, developing her skills as a poet and essayist. After she received her master of fine arts degree, she was awarded a fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison. There, she further crafted her thesis, honing the manuscript that would become her first book, Miracle Fruit. In 2000, her chapbook, Fishbone won the Snail’s Pace Poetry Prize.

After her fellowship, she was hired to teach creative writing for the State University of New York at Fredonia and moved to western New York. Shortly thereafter, Miracle Fruit was selected as winner of the Tupelo Press Prize. Published in 2003, it later went on to win the Global Filipino Award and was finalist for both The Glasgow Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Around 2006, Nezhukumatathil married essayist and fellow teacher Dustin Parsons and began a family.

Her 2007 collection, At The Drive-In Volcano, won the Balcones Prize and in 2009, she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lucky Fish, her third collection, came out in 2011. That same year, Nezhukumatathil and the poet Ross Gay began to write epistolary poetry back and forth to discuss their love of the natural world. These poems were collected in a chapbook called Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens, published in 2014. Oceanic, her fourth book—which includes “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance”—was published in 2018 by Copper Canyon Press.

After 15 years in New York, Nezhukumatathil was awarded the Grisham Writer-in-Residence in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program for 2016-2017. In 2020, she was named a Guggenheim fellow in poetry and her first book of essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments became a best-seller and the Barnes & Noble Book of the Year. As an active editor and advisor, Nezhukumatathil has been connected to BOA Editions, Kundiman, Orion magazine, and Poets & Writers magazine. Sierra Magazine of The Sierra Club named her the first-ever poetry editor of the magazine in 2021.

She currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi with Parsons and their sons. She continues to teach poetry and environmental literature at the University of Mississippi, where she is a professor of English in the MFA program. Her next two books, Bite By Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, a book of essays on food, and an as yet untitled new collection of love poems about the earth are forthcoming by Ecco Press.

Poem Text

Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance.” 2018. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker is in a classroom listening to the teacher take attendance. The school is clean, and the students are all bathed. However, the antiseptic scent bothers the speaker. When the teacher reaches the speaker’s name, he mispronounces it, causing the other students to gawk at the speaker. To cope with embarrassment, the speaker imagines the classroom as a large sea scallop. The eyes of the students equate to the scallop’s anatomy. The thought of the scallop leads the speaker to a comforting memory of a trip to the China Sea with her family. The speaker remembers immersing her head in the water to look at the sea creatures. The speaker returns to the present situation, and while confronting the stares of her classmates, she encourages herself to imagine that the other students were once vulnerable, too. Still, the speaker’s mind returns to her classmates’ school supplies, especially the sharp writing utensils and “handheld pencil sharpener[s]” (Line 23). The poem ends with its focus on the sharpener’s “tiny blade” (Line 23).