The distinctive structure of Did I Miss Anything? and Ex-Basketball Player contributes to the development of their themes. In Did I Miss Anything?, the author uses each stanza as a response from different viewpoints, the teacher and the student. The stanzas are organized in a way that the different viewpoints are interchangeably respond to “Did I Miss Anything?” The sarcastic tone in the poem expresses how a teacher feels when students ask if they missed anything when they were absent in class. For example, the speaker says, “Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here we sat with our hands folded on our desks in silence, for the full two hours,” which means how frustrated the teacher is with the question. In the poem, the speaker is trying
