The Poetry Lesson
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| Author | Andrei Codrescu |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel/Memoir |
| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Publication date | October 20, 2010 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 128 |
| ISBN | 978-0-691-14724-6 |
| Preceded by | The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (2009) |
The Poetry Lesson is a 2010 book by Romanian-American poet and commentator Andrei Codrescu published by Princeton University Press. The work recounts a single three-hour session of an Introduction to Poetry Writing class taught by a professor on the eve of retirement at a Louisiana university. Neither a conventional novel nor a straightforward memoir, the narrative blends classroom scenes with digressions into the professor's memories of poets and the literary counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The central pedagogical device involves assigning each student a deceased or living poet as a "Ghost-Companion" to study throughout the semester. Codrescu wrote the book during his final year teaching at Louisiana State University, where he had been a professor of English for twenty-five years.[1]
Codrescu wrote The Poetry Lesson during his final year of teaching at Louisiana State University, where he had taught literature and creative writing for twenty-five years before retiring in 2009. In an interview with Mark Spitzer and students at the University of Central Arkansas, Codrescu explained that he composed the book "in the hours after teaching his undergraduate poetry seminar." He described the work as "a lived piece of reportage, in one sense, an autobiographical invention on the other, and a meditation on poetry scenes that had a bearing on the 'lesson.'"
The book is based on his experience in American poetry education, which dated back to the 1970s. In 1979, while a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, he conducted poetry workshops at local schools, including McDonogh School in Baltimore, where he led students outdoors to observe their surroundings rather than work from textbooks. His teaching approach emphasized spontaneity and sensory awareness over conventional instruction.
Codrescu's pedagogical approach in The Poetry Lesson reflects his engagement with Dadaist principles, which he explored at length in The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press, 2009) one year before The Poetry Lesson. In a 2009 essay for Inside Higher Ed titled "Dada in the Classroom", Codrescu described implementing Dada-inspired experimental assignments in his poetry workshops, such as having students write words on fruit which they then read aloud, rotated among classmates, and consumed as a form of performance art. He explained that such exercises demonstrated that "poetry can be edible," that "fruit is a sexier medium than paper or pixels," and that "school could be fun."[2] The Posthuman Dada Guide articulates Codrescu's view that Dada's anti-authoritarian ethos and emphasis on spontaneity, play, and provocation provided a model for subverting conventional academic instruction—principles that underpin the unconventional teaching methods dramatized in The Poetry Lesson.
In discussing the book's composition, Codrescu said that writing it made him realize "just how boring 'teaching creative writing' is these days, and how many unimaginative drones who were themselves 'taught' by unimaginative drones are fouling the air in our institutions of so-called 'higher' learning." He described the work as using "some composite of youths of the 21st century" and writing "without fear of digression because I would inevitably return to class the next week and come back to my characters."
Codrescu's teaching philosophy, as shown in the book, rejected conventional academic approaches to poetry instruction. He told interviewers that he preferred to focus on "playing and instructing students in the poetic mode, in thinking poetically, and even living that way." He. said that the book emerged from his conviction that poetry education had become overly institutionalized and his desire to capture what he saw as the freewheeling, experimental spirit of an earlier era of American poetry.[3][4][5][6]
