The Poetry Lesson

Codrescu, Andrei

ISBN 10: 0691147248 / ISBN 13: 9780691147246

Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2010

About this Item

Octavo Size [approx 15.5 x 22.8cm]. Near Fine condition in a Near Fine Dustjacket. DJ protected in our purpose-made clear archival plastic sleeve. A very nice copy. Previous owner's signature to preliminary pages. Robust, professional packaging and tracking provided for all parcels. 118 pages. The first day of a creative writing course - somewhere between a novel and a memoir. "A series of zany autobiographical sketches and satirical reflections on youth, literature, and academia." Cummings, Literary Review.

Seller Inventory # 312832

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Poetry Lesson
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691147248
• ISBN 13: 9780691147246
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern 1st

About this title

Synopsis

"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: 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 assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siecle 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 Codrescu: 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.

About the Author

Andrei Codrescu is an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, and NPR commentator. He edits the online journal Exquisite Corpse and taught literature and creative writing at Louisiana State University for twenty-five years before retiring in 2009 as the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English. His recent work includes "The Posthuman Dada Guide" (Princeton) and "Jealous Witness: Poems".