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I turned to pedagogy: “Self-consciousness is a beautiful thing if the self is conscious of its beauty. Need a self so beautiful also be selfconscious? In this matter, cats have it all over us. Not only do they not concern themselves with esthetics, they don’t even question the miracle of knowing how to pose. Something in their slick bodies knows that they are being watched and that they must look their best. That something is a poetic knowledge we will learn in this class.”

The young bodies at their school desks straightened, flexed, stretched. The hunger in them drove their animal selves to the fore. And this is how poetry is taught, I replied with some satisfaction to all those people who, over the years, questioned the possibility of teaching poetry. In their minds few things were unteachable, but poetry was one of those. I wish they’d been right.

Unfortunately, poetry was exceedingly teachable. One reached for the end of any thread in the tangled ball of yarn of what we know and pulled: the thing unraveled and that was poetry. I had trained thousands to pull a thread from this ball of life-yarn, and now they trail strings wherever they walk, true kittens of capitalism. An eighteenthcentury poet locked up overnight in a modern poetry library would not experience the same shock he would if faced with a car or a computer: the words are in English, the sentence structure looks familiar, even the blank verse is understandable. The content might be hard going at times, especially if there are cars and computers in it, but he would have no trouble identifying the grand themes of love and terror, and he would quickly figure out the relatively new expressions of awkwardness and embarrassment. Humor would be new to him only to the extent that it might lack ruddiness or vigor, as if the hale laughter of his day had been blanched like an almond. He would sniff at modern irony: “translation for the ladies!” He might experience some disorientation before the modern insistence on fruits and vegetables, animals and brand names, but he would attribute it to a taxonomic disease, a virus of the concrete. Such ills were not unknown in his day, they defined the prose of naturalists and adventurers. One expected Humboldt or Darwin to name and describe everything because that was their job, to come upon new things to name and describe. Theirs was the first gaze. The poets’ job was to cast a weary second glance on the world and to look fondly into eternal sentiments with a musical insistence that  made them new. Love, for instance. An eighteenth-century poet did not bring love to the object of his attention, he elicited it and then and only then did he pronounce Oh! Love was in all things, a fundamental substance activated by the poet’s gaze. Everything else was stories to illustrate this eternal truth, including ruddy vulgar stories that made the listeners howl with glee. Modern poetry, it would seem to him, had stripped, or rather scooped out, eternity from the core of things, and had flattened them to see and classify and name drily, after which operation (some) poetry proceeded to re-romanticize the whole thing by means of interjections and projections, like archeologists reassembling smashed pots. Why, oh why, would lament the eighteenth-century poet, must you do this? Happily, by then it would be morning and the library reopened, allowing him to slip unobserved back to his own time.

“Carlos Rios, how would you like to have Rimbaud?” I was becoming generous because I was reaching the end of the alphabet. Normally, I award Rimbaud at midterm to my best student, but I was feeling magnanimous as I watched the eighteenth-century poet scurry out of the library and vanish into the bright light. I could advance to the nineteenth century and hand out my treasure, Arthur Rimbaud, who quit writing when he was the same age as Carlos Rios.

“Is this like the Big Brother thing?” Carlos was suspicious.

“Yes, but he’s dead and quit writing poetry when he was no older than you, but since he’ll be your Ghost-Companion you will consult with him on your assignments. You can ask questions about life of your G-C, if you want. A ghost is like a book you open to find the answer to a question. You ask and listen and the ghost goes, ‘Hey, Carlos, you shouldn’t have so many burgers, man. Bad for your heart.’ That’s how caring ghosts are. Of course, if you’re feeling bad and you’re having girlfriend problems, you can go, ‘Hey, Rimbaud, what am I doing wrong, ‘cause she just turns over in bed and won’t even let me tell her a bedtime story?’”

“Maybe a bedtime story is not what she wants,” said Chloe.

“Whatever,” I said.

At the time this Introduction to Writing Poetry class was taking place, “whatever” had replaced “like” and “you know” as the favorite transition for the young, and I must say that I preferred it. “Whatever” felt more meaningful, like a flattening out of the unexpected depths opened by what was said. The young know that everything they say is profound, especially if it is addressed to authority, or is in any way serious. Once a serious sequence of words has welled out of a young person in the presence of authority, the only choice is to flatline it, to take out the peaks and valleys that always show up. They could say, “When I said that I wanted to battle a robot on a field of corn chips, I didn’t mean it to sound so mean,” or they could say, “Whatever.” How much more sensible and more unive