Poetry lessons

Every poet and every student of poetry and everyone who reads or writes or thinks about poetry ought to read The Poetry Lesson by Andrei Codrescu, a fanciful and cynical and altogether exhilarating description of the first class session in an Introduction to Poetry class and a brief book ranging widely through the author's encounters with poets living and dead. How is it possible for a dead poet to shoot a gun at a living devotee of poetry? You'll have to read the book to learn the answer to that question, as well as others:

On whether poetry is teachable: "Unfortunately, poetry was exceedingly teachable. One reached for the end of any thread in the tangled ball of yarn of what we know and pulled: the thing unraveled and that was poetry. I had trained thousands to pull a thread from this ball of life-yarn, and now they trail strings wherever they walk, true kittens of capitalism."

On the difference between professors and poets: "The professors are not afflicted by the identity crisis that is my only subject. They go about in the certainty of their well-cultivated fields and keep adding what they can to the antheap of text before them. My job, I think, is to burn all that came before me--by handing my predecessors to the students to misunderstand, if it comes to that, which it obviously does."

On why American students seem so much younger than Europeans: "the right to a prolonged childhood was hard fought-for and laboriously won by generation after generation, wherever and whenever. The long, physical strain of standing and fighting only to earn the right to lie down and dream was humanity's story."

On what a poet needs: "Every poet worth his or her salt, and, trust me, this is the only reward we get for the hard work we do, and in this sense we are still one with the ancient Romans who valued salt above all else, as does, I'm sure, the Borden family, whose cows, no matter what their level of culture, still require their salt licks, every salty poet, then, had a good fountain pen."

That's a sentence I would give my eye-teeth to have written, but if I couldn't write it, I can at least enjoy the experience of encountering it in print.