An exam usually makes a promise: somewhere behind the questions sits a right answer, and someone holds the key. Dave Bonta's "Exam" keeps the look of the thing, with numbered sections, clipped questions and bossy one-word commands, but quietly withdraws the promise. What remains is a test that cannot be marked. Its central idea seems to be that real learning is less about retrieving facts than about being changed by attention.
The first section sets the trap. "Jot or tittle?" asks us to choose between two names for the tiniest marks of writing, words that normally travel together in the phrase "jot and tittle," meaning every last detail. "Eye or eye-drop?" plays on sound: the two words nearly merge, though one is an organ of sight and the other a bead of liquid. "Hole or window?" asks whether an opening is a lack or a view, and the answer depends on who is looking. Then comes the flat "Explain.", the only line that sounds like a real exam and the one hardest to obey. The three pairs move from writing to seeing to the thing seen through, as if the poem were adjusting our eyes before the test begins.
Section 2 isn't a question at all. "Make yourself / uncomfortable" is an instruction about the examinee's state, not knowledge, and the line break leaves "yourself" standing alone for a moment before the discomfort arrives. Section 3 returns to the either/or pattern, now with a creature: "How many legs does it have? / Is it woody or chitinous?" The choice sets plant material against insect armor. Judging by the imagery, a stick insect might fit, but the poem never says. The creature sits on a border, and the tidy categories can't hold it. The hard, clicking word "chitinous" also stands out among plain ones, like a specialist's vocabulary dropped into a schoolroom.
Section 4 is the funniest and the most revealing. The examiner's voice trips over itself: "You are a cat. / No, not you— / you are nothing like a cat!" The dash catches the stumble, and the final line, "Help us find the cat," admits the examiners are as lost as we are. The reader is cast, uncast, and then recruited as a fellow searcher, so the test turns into a shared hunt.
Section 5 turns ordinary grammar around. Normally time is told to us and books are read by us; here we are asked what we would tell time and what we would read to books. Clocks and books become listeners, and the world fills up with audiences. Section 6 gives the poem's central paradox in its longest sentence: "Invent a ceremony for / the successful failure of an exam." The enjambment after "for" leaves the ceremony hanging for a beat. A ceremony marks a passage, so failing is treated as a threshold rather than a verdict. The line also reads back onto the poem itself, an exam we pass by refusing to answer in the expected way.
Then comes the shortest section: "Demonstrate molting." Two words, one line, and a physical act where we expected an essay. It links back to the chitinous creature of section 3, since a hard-cased animal must shed its shell to grow and is soft and exposed while it does. It also answers "Make yourself uncomfortable," because molting is exactly that. The poem ends by asking the examinee to shed the role of examinee.
The poem uses no rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm comes from short sentences, repeated question shapes, and a gradual thinning of the sections, ending on a single line. The first half leans on the pattern of "X or Y?", and the second half drops choices for imperatives, as if multiple choice had given way to action.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It borrows a form associated with ranking and anxiety and turns it inside out with humor, so the questions become invitations. Its final request is the only one a reader can truly answer, and only by changing.