num_pages: 128
description: Intro to Poetry Writing is always like a long labor a breech birth or obversely mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall) you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'-- The Poetry LessonThe Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a typical fin-de-sicle salaried beatnik--one with an antic imagination an outsized personality and libido and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei irreverent unconventional brilliant and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook hypnosis and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing misunderstanding mistranslating . . . ) and assigns each of them a tutelary Ghost-Companion poet the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet teacher and storyteller.
language: English
title: The Poetry Lesson
publisher: Princeton University Press