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"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-siècle 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 1960's and 1970's, 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.

Poets --- Authors --- A Coney Island of the Mind. --- Aldous Huxley. --- Allen Ginsberg. --- Amiri Baraka. --- An Embarrassment of Riches. --- Anna Akhmatova. --- Aphorism. --- Aram Saroyan. --- Arthur Rimbaud. --- Aubade. --- Barney Rosset. --- Beat Generation. --- Bei Dao. --- Bertolt Brecht. --- Black Man. --- Blank verse. --- Boredom. --- Britney Spears. --- Cataclysm (Dragonlance). --- Charles Bukowski. --- Che Guevara. --- Cunt. --- De Profundis (letter). --- Death in Venice. --- Deathbed. --- Edgar Allan Poe. --- Emily Dickinson. --- English muffin. --- Ezra Pound. --- Feral cat. --- Flapper. --- French Colonial. --- French Communist Party. --- From Beyond the Grave. --- Futility (poem). --- Gabriela Mistral. --- Gaggle. --- Gertrude Stein. --- Gregory Corso. --- Guerrilla warfare. --- Guillaume Apollinaire. --- Heir to the Empire. --- Hippie. --- His Family. --- I Wish (manhwa). --- In Another Country. --- Isadora Duncan. --- Jack Kerouac. --- Jacques Maritain. --- James Merrill. --- Jan Hus. --- Jan Kerouac. --- Jim Morrison. --- Joan Vollmer. --- Junkie (novel). --- Kitsch. --- Lawrence Ferlinghetti. --- Libido. --- Lord Byron. --- Marilyn Monroe. --- Max Jacob. --- McSorley's Old Ale House. --- Memoir. --- Mennonite. --- Mexico City Blues. --- Milan Kundera. --- Miroslav Holub. --- Monomania. --- Mr. --- Naked Lunch. --- Nobel Prize. --- Olga Rudge. --- Orgy. --- Patti Smith. --- Pheromone. --- Pocket watch. --- Poet laureate. --- Poetry. --- Pretty Face. --- Pyramid scheme. --- Racism. --- Rant (novel). --- Red Mass. --- Ridicule. --- Shel Silverstein. --- Sodomy. --- Surrealism. --- Take Shelter. --- The New York Times Book Review. --- The Other Hand. --- The Price of Gold. --- The Scary Guy. --- This Country. --- To This Day. --- Tristan Tzara. --- Under the Volcano. --- Wallace Stevens. --- War and War. --- William Saroyan. --- Young Widow.