Professor uses my poem as an example in his lesson.

The professor of my Poetry class uses my poem as an example to teach our class.

Although we will be discussing how poetry condenses or compresses language in subsequent lectures, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the topic and cite selections from poems the class has submitted. These are "before" and "after" selections to demonstrate how the information presented can be done with fewer words, tighter lines, and shorter stanzas.

What do we mean when we identify poetic language as different from prose?
Among the many differences, the foremost is compactness. Poets use imagery, symbolism, metaphor and other mechanisms to pack a great deal of substance--emotions, ideas, information--into each line of poetry. In this lecture, the mechanism that interest us is the the process by which unnecessary words are eliminated. Where prose often conveys meaning in expansive ways, using complete sentences and grammatically correct structures, poetry not only manages with fewer words but strives for fewer words. Poetry tries to use a minimum number of words to encapsulate, preserve and amplify a particular experience, sensation, thought or feeling. One critic describes this as "stripping language to its bare essentials" to make the intended point.
Poetic lines are thus not automatically created by simply chopping up a prose paragraph into individual lines, but rather by making conscious choices to choose one word over another, or in this instance, by discarding words that are not necessary, repetitive for no purpose, or lacking needed meaning.
What are some of these words that can often be be discarded?
1. Prose sentences contain words that exist only to create grammatically correct sentences. "It is Tuesday" and "It is raining" and "There is a cockroach" are sentences that each have just one important word: Tuesday, raining, cockroach. The other words are there to create the subject-verb structure of the typical sentence in English. They are completely superfluous in poetic lines.
2. Other words poets often manage without are: is, are, was, were, (especially in "there is" or "there are," often avoided by prose writers as well). They are called "verbs of being," and they function only to indicate time in a sentence, while "verbs of action" such as walk, climbed, running, fought provide information about both time and action, and are thus so much more valuable in poetry!
3. Then there are all sorts of function words speakers and prose writers use, such as: such as, for example, in addition, and other such words that connect and separate ideas, but can easily replaced with line breaks in poetry.
4. But for my money, the most superfluous words in poetry (most obviously in first person poems) are the self-reflective comments: I thought, I remmbered, I decided, I had the feeling that, it seemed to me, and so on, endlessly. The speaker or narrator in the poem is obviuosly doing all these things. Why is it necessary to characterize the obvious? If the poet writes "When I was back in seminary/they put forth the proposition/that you can petition the Lord/with prayer," is it really necessary to say "I remember?" And when the poet continues: "Petition the Lord with prayer?/You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!" is it really necessary to say, "Now, when I think about how I felt back then I have come to the decision that?" 
Obviously there are other ways to condense the poetic line--imagery, symbolism, metaphor, sound, line breaks, to name a few--but for our purposes here, let's pretend that the only requirement is to render a written line more succinctly, more tersely, more tightly by eliminating the unnecessary, the pointlessly repetitive, the self-reflective, and the words devoid of content. To illustrate, here are some lines from poems class members have submitted and shorter, more concise, more crisp, more direct and more condensed lines.

ORIGINAL #1

Ode to City Electric

This is a great place to work,
They say with a straight face.
Someday you can become a salesman too
Making the owner Sandy millions,
sitting at a comfortable desk
working at a leisurely pace.

Then someone appears one day, you’re told
To learn the computer system
To take the comfortable place of one of those
calm, content people
Sitting at a desk in one of those rooms upstairs,
Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,

Dirty warehouse worker,
Unfit to breathe the same air.

Why are you taking so long
Filling orders?
Searching high and low
for something not there.
But according to the computer it is,
Are you blind?
Is the prescription on those glasses you wear
Up to date?
We by the virtue of being employees
Of the great City Electric
Can get a 15 percent discount at Lens crafters
You sightless, stupid fool.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for,
Search the area nearby
Where the computer says it should be.
Develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,
Telepathy, telekinesis.

COMPRESSED VERSION #1

 Ode to City Electric

“This is a great place to work,” they say with a straight face,
“Someday you can become a salesman too.”
Then someone appears one day,
tells me to learn                                      (the active uses fewer words than the passive)
the computer system,
to take the comfortable place of calm, content people                 
sitting at a desk in rooms upstairs,                    (in one of those unncessary) 
Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,

            Dirty warehouse worker,
            Unfit to breathe the same air.

“Why are you taking so long filling orders?”
I search high and low for something not there.
“Are you blind, sightless, stupid fool.
City Electric employees get 15% Lens Crafters discount"
or develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,
Telepathy, telekinesis.