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The Poetry Lesson (2010)

by Andrei Codrescu(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0691147248 (ISBN13: 9780691147246)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Princeton University Press

review 1: Is it memoir or is it fiction? It seems a mix of the two and recounts the first day of a poetry writing class at a Louisiana university, with a professor much like Codrescu, who is finishing his teaching career. It is about poetry, especially Codrescu's experience with American poets from the Beats on, but also about the teacher-student relationship and the difficulty of aging. The teacher assigns epigrams as the first assignment and gives every student a poet Ghost-Companion based on their last name. The students are characters, perhaps caricatures, but it is a fun ride down/through Codrescu's own history.
review 2: This short book will be best appreciated by anyone who has ever tried to teach poetry or who loves and appreciates poetry. Codrescu basically tak... morees us through the first day of his 3 hour long Intro to Poetry college class, the last course he taught before retiring. During this time, he allows us to ramble through his quite amazing mind, a crammed storehouse of erudition and poetic experience and random fact that's just very entertaining. We listen in on the stories he tells about poets, his life, his travels, and the wisdom he's gained from poems, plus we tune in to what he's thinking as he conducts the class, an aspect of this book that college English professors will especially appreciate. (He assigns each student a Ghost-Companion, a dead poet whose last name must start with the same letter as their own, who they are to learn all about and to keep inside their heads as a constant guide.) Observations about the young students in his class are dead on perfect. His thoughts are profound, amusing, clever, and expansive, with many, many wonderful insights not only about poetry but also about young college students, aging in a modern world, teaching, and (above all else) the power of poetry. I wish I could've taken that class and been assigned a Ghost-Companion too. less

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