Items related to The Poetry Lesson

Codrescu, Andrei The Poetry Lesson ISBN 13: 9780691147246

The Poetry Lesson - Hardcover

 
9780691147246: The Poetry Lesson
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 
"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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:
"The Poetry Lesson is a gem--a consistently engaging and entertainingly rambling meditation on teaching and poetry that is filled with Andrei Codrescu's quicksilver mental responses. His teacher-narrator keeps vacillating between denouncing the new, text-message order of his students and trying to ally himself with youth against old-fogeyism. This dance, as the teacher is alternately chagrined and amused, gives the book a lively pulse."--Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag

"Andrei Codrescu's new book is a small comic masterpiece. It is so funny that I laughed out loud as I was turning the pages. The account of the first poetry writing class of the semester is as accurate as it is surreal. What makes the writing so delightful is the juxtaposition of student repartee and the professor's jaundiced--but never predictable--response. The Poetry Lesson is a delightful read--but also a disturbing portrait of academe today."--Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir

"This book, with its punishing, dread-inspiring title and pleading skeleton on the cover, is actually one of the funniest, most irreverent you'll read this year. Part memoir, part novel, part poem, part essay. . . . The Poetry Lesson requires the willing suspension of credulity and a reader's refusal to get offended, hard as Andrei Codrescu may try. He's not quite Borat in emeritus robes, but almost."---Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

"Andrei Codrescu's The Poetry Lesson, the description of a single, three-hour poetry-writing class, is genuinely entertaining. . . . [I]t is . . . funny, moving, daring and even, at times, profound. . . . The book is a kind of ode to eccentricity, to imagination within the institution."---Jonathan Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

"A series of zany autobiographical sketches and satirical reflections on youth, literature, and academia."---Anthony Cummins, Literary Review

"Beneath Codrescu's wacky, self-amused teaching methods, perfected poet-in-a-phrase descriptions, off-kilter teacher-student dialogue and old-timer digressions, there can be found a pestering ambivalence toward the university and a suspicion that he is a hypocrite."---Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Forward

"You should read this book and absorb its lessons as soon as possible."---J.C. Hallman, Quarterly Conversation

"This genially disillusioned, free-associative romp delivers plenty of pleasures in the course of 118 pages. . . . Faced with time and mortality--the quintessential poetic subjects--Codrescu does what great artists have done for millennia: He tells stories, writes poems, and, yes, he teaches."---Chris Waddington, New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Codrescu proceeds headlong in an altogether entertaining 'pedagogical-memorialistic mode.'. . . Ultimately, this book is about Codrescu's prickly narrative voice and the delight he takes in blabbing. It's a voice confident in its charming idiosyncrasies, spicier than his NPR pieces."---Ron Slate, On the Seawall

"Not a creative writing 'how-to' manual, not an essay, not a novel, not a memoir--The Poetry Lesson resists genre classification with all the radical aplomb of an angry beatnik refusing to tick the 'which-age-demographic' box on a government census form."---Chris Jones, Times Higher Education Supplement
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".

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780691178059: The Poetry Lesson

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780691178059
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2017
Softcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Stock Image

Codrescu, Andrei
Published by Princeton University Press (2010)
ISBN 10: 0691147248 ISBN 13: 9780691147246
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0691147248

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 19.15
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: £ 3.17
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Codrescu, Andrei
Published by Princeton University Press (2010)
ISBN 10: 0691147248 ISBN 13: 9780691147246
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0691147248

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 22.33
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: £ 3.37
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Codrescu, Andrei
ISBN 10: 0691147248 ISBN 13: 9780691147246
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Front Cover Books
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover0691147248

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 24.70
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: £ 3.41
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Codrescu, Andrei
Published by Princeton University Press (2010)
ISBN 10: 0691147248 ISBN 13: 9780691147246
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Wizard Books
(Long Beach, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0691147248

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 45.14
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: £ 2.77
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Codrescu, Andrei
Published by Princeton University Press (2010)
ISBN 10: 0691147248 ISBN 13: 9780691147246
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
The Book Spot
(Sioux Falls, SD, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks174849

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 48.14
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Codrescu, Andrei
Published by Princeton University Press (2010)
ISBN 10: 0691147248 ISBN 13: 9780691147246
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
BennettBooksLtd
(LOS ANGELES, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.65. Seller Inventory # Q-0691147248

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
£ 49.43
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: £ 3.27
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds