Author: Robert Tallant
Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company
ISBN: 145561369X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
"Interesting investigation and straightforward handling of sensational times and tricksters, of the cult of voodooism in all its manifestations. From its first known appearances in New Orleans of 200 years ago, here are the fetishes and formulae, the rites and dances, the cures, charms and gris-gris. Here were the witch-doctors and queens, and in particular a Doctor John who acquired fame and fortune, and Marie Laveau, who with her daughter dominated the weird underworld of voodoo for nearly a century." -Kirkus Reviews "Robert Tallant speaks with authority." -The New York Times "Much nonsense has been written about voodoo in New Orleans. . .here is a truthful and definitive picture." -Lyle Saxton Originally published in 1946, Voodoo In New Orleans examines the origins of the cult voodooism. The lives of New Orleans's most infamous witch doctors and voodoo queens have been re-created in this well-researched account of New Orleans's dark underworld.
VOODOO IN NEW ORLEANS
Author: Robert Tallant
Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company
ISBN: 145561369X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
"Interesting investigation and straightforward handling of sensational times and tricksters, of the cult of voodooism in all its manifestations. From its first known appearances in New Orleans of 200 years ago, here are the fetishes and formulae, the rites and dances, the cures, charms and gris-gris. Here were the witch-doctors and queens, and in particular a Doctor John who acquired fame and fortune, and Marie Laveau, who with her daughter dominated the weird underworld of voodoo for nearly a century." -Kirkus Reviews "Robert Tallant speaks with authority." -The New York Times "Much nonsense has been written about voodoo in New Orleans. . .here is a truthful and definitive picture." -Lyle Saxton Originally published in 1946, Voodoo In New Orleans examines the origins of the cult voodooism. The lives of New Orleans's most infamous witch doctors and voodoo queens have been re-created in this well-researched account of New Orleans's dark underworld.
Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company
ISBN: 145561369X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
"Interesting investigation and straightforward handling of sensational times and tricksters, of the cult of voodooism in all its manifestations. From its first known appearances in New Orleans of 200 years ago, here are the fetishes and formulae, the rites and dances, the cures, charms and gris-gris. Here were the witch-doctors and queens, and in particular a Doctor John who acquired fame and fortune, and Marie Laveau, who with her daughter dominated the weird underworld of voodoo for nearly a century." -Kirkus Reviews "Robert Tallant speaks with authority." -The New York Times "Much nonsense has been written about voodoo in New Orleans. . .here is a truthful and definitive picture." -Lyle Saxton Originally published in 1946, Voodoo In New Orleans examines the origins of the cult voodooism. The lives of New Orleans's most infamous witch doctors and voodoo queens have been re-created in this well-researched account of New Orleans's dark underworld.
Signposts in a Strange Land
Author: Walker Percy
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453216375
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
Writings on the South, Catholicism, and more from the National Book Award winner: “His nonfiction is always entertaining and enlightening” (Library Journal). Published just after Walker Percy’s death, Signposts in a Strange Land takes readers through the philosophical, religious, and literary ideas of one of the South’s most profound and unique thinkers. Each essay is laced with wit and insight into the human condition. From race relations and the mysteries of existence, to Catholicism and the joys of drinking bourbon, this collection offers a window into the underpinnings of Percy’s celebrated novels and brings to light the stirring thoughts and voice of a giant of twentieth century literature.
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453216375
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
Writings on the South, Catholicism, and more from the National Book Award winner: “His nonfiction is always entertaining and enlightening” (Library Journal). Published just after Walker Percy’s death, Signposts in a Strange Land takes readers through the philosophical, religious, and literary ideas of one of the South’s most profound and unique thinkers. Each essay is laced with wit and insight into the human condition. From race relations and the mysteries of existence, to Catholicism and the joys of drinking bourbon, this collection offers a window into the underpinnings of Percy’s celebrated novels and brings to light the stirring thoughts and voice of a giant of twentieth century literature.
Etouffee, Mon Amour
Author: Kerri McCaffety
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781455603893
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
This luxurious photography book on New Orleans restaurants celebrates the city's love affair with food. From the legendary Tujague's to the down-home Uglesich's, these beloved establishments are shown off in all their glory for residents and visitors alike. From the antebellum legacies of grand old restaurants like Antoine's, Commander's Palace, and Bruning's to the newcomers like Jacques-Imo's, Bayona, and Clancy's, not to mention the legion in between, the countless stories of establishments dedicated to the je ne sais quoi of dining form part of the essential history of New Orleans. This rich mix of history and evocative photographs documents an unparalleled majesty of the senses, a decadent revelry in the past, and the daily marking of pleasure. Kerri McCaffety is the first-place winner of the 1999 Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas Award for a self-illustrated article. The New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association named McCaffetyis first book, Obituary Cocktail, Book of the Year for 1998. Her second book, The Majesty of the French Quarter, was called 'a vision to behold' by Gambit literary reviewer Julia Kamysz Lane, and 'easily one of the most handsome coffee table books in years' by the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger . The New Orleans Times-Picayune referred to her third book, The Majesty of St. Charles Avenue, as 'fit for royalty.' Her writing and photojournalism appear in publications including the Oxford American, Town and Country, Historic Traveler, Colonial Homes, Southern Accents, Travel Leisure, Metropolitan Home, and the Seattle Times.
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781455603893
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
This luxurious photography book on New Orleans restaurants celebrates the city's love affair with food. From the legendary Tujague's to the down-home Uglesich's, these beloved establishments are shown off in all their glory for residents and visitors alike. From the antebellum legacies of grand old restaurants like Antoine's, Commander's Palace, and Bruning's to the newcomers like Jacques-Imo's, Bayona, and Clancy's, not to mention the legion in between, the countless stories of establishments dedicated to the je ne sais quoi of dining form part of the essential history of New Orleans. This rich mix of history and evocative photographs documents an unparalleled majesty of the senses, a decadent revelry in the past, and the daily marking of pleasure. Kerri McCaffety is the first-place winner of the 1999 Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas Award for a self-illustrated article. The New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association named McCaffetyis first book, Obituary Cocktail, Book of the Year for 1998. Her second book, The Majesty of the French Quarter, was called 'a vision to behold' by Gambit literary reviewer Julia Kamysz Lane, and 'easily one of the most handsome coffee table books in years' by the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger . The New Orleans Times-Picayune referred to her third book, The Majesty of St. Charles Avenue, as 'fit for royalty.' Her writing and photojournalism appear in publications including the Oxford American, Town and Country, Historic Traveler, Colonial Homes, Southern Accents, Travel Leisure, Metropolitan Home, and the Seattle Times.
Three Hundred Years of Decadence
Author: Robert Azzarello
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
New Orleans’s reputation as a decadent city stems in part from its environmental precariousness, its Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connections, its Catholicism, and its litany of alleged “vices,” encompassing prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality, and any number of the seven deadly sins. An evocative work of cultural criticism, Robert Azzarello’s Three Hundred Years of Decadence argues that decadence can convey a more nuanced meaning than simple decay or decline conceived in physical, social, or moral terms. Instead, within New Orleans literature, decadence possesses a complex, even paradoxical relationship with concepts like beauty and health, progress, and technological advance. Azzarello presents the concept of decadence, along with its perception and the uneasy social relations that result, as a suggestive avenue for decoding the long, shifting story of New Orleans and its position in the transatlantic world. By analyzing literary works that span from the late seventeenth century to contemporary speculations about the city’s future, Azzarello uncovers how decadence often names a transfiguration of values, in which ideas about supposed good and bad cannot maintain their stability and end up morphing into one another. These evolving representations of a decadent New Orleans, which Azzarello traces with attention to both details of local history and insights from critical theory, reveal the extent to which the city functions as a contact zone for peoples and cultures from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing on a deep and understudied archive of New Orleans literature, Azzarello considers texts from multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama, song, and travel writing), including many written in languages other than English. His analysis includes such works of transcription and translation as George Washington Cable’s “Creole Slave Songs” and Mary Haas’s Tunica Texts, which he places in dialogue with canonical and recent works about the city, as well as with neglected texts like Ludwig von Reizenstein’s German-language serial The Mysteries of New Orleans and Charles Chesnutt’s novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. With its careful analysis and focused scope, Three Hundred Years of Decadence uncovers the immense significance—historically, politically, and aesthetically—that literary imaginings of a decadent New Orleans hold for understanding the city’s position as a multicultural, transatlantic contact zone.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
New Orleans’s reputation as a decadent city stems in part from its environmental precariousness, its Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connections, its Catholicism, and its litany of alleged “vices,” encompassing prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality, and any number of the seven deadly sins. An evocative work of cultural criticism, Robert Azzarello’s Three Hundred Years of Decadence argues that decadence can convey a more nuanced meaning than simple decay or decline conceived in physical, social, or moral terms. Instead, within New Orleans literature, decadence possesses a complex, even paradoxical relationship with concepts like beauty and health, progress, and technological advance. Azzarello presents the concept of decadence, along with its perception and the uneasy social relations that result, as a suggestive avenue for decoding the long, shifting story of New Orleans and its position in the transatlantic world. By analyzing literary works that span from the late seventeenth century to contemporary speculations about the city’s future, Azzarello uncovers how decadence often names a transfiguration of values, in which ideas about supposed good and bad cannot maintain their stability and end up morphing into one another. These evolving representations of a decadent New Orleans, which Azzarello traces with attention to both details of local history and insights from critical theory, reveal the extent to which the city functions as a contact zone for peoples and cultures from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing on a deep and understudied archive of New Orleans literature, Azzarello considers texts from multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama, song, and travel writing), including many written in languages other than English. His analysis includes such works of transcription and translation as George Washington Cable’s “Creole Slave Songs” and Mary Haas’s Tunica Texts, which he places in dialogue with canonical and recent works about the city, as well as with neglected texts like Ludwig von Reizenstein’s German-language serial The Mysteries of New Orleans and Charles Chesnutt’s novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. With its careful analysis and focused scope, Three Hundred Years of Decadence uncovers the immense significance—historically, politically, and aesthetically—that literary imaginings of a decadent New Orleans hold for understanding the city’s position as a multicultural, transatlantic contact zone.
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Author: Marguerite Duras
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190618
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 111
Book Description
The award-winning screenplay for the classic film the New York Post hailed as “overwhelming . . . a motion picture landmark.” One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics’ Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and inhumanity.
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802190618
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 111
Book Description
The award-winning screenplay for the classic film the New York Post hailed as “overwhelming . . . a motion picture landmark.” One of the most influential works in the history of cinema, Alain Renais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour gathered international acclaim upon its release in 1959 and was awarded the International Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film festival and the New York Film Critics’ Award. Ostensibly the story of a love affair between a Japanese architect and a French actress visiting Japan to make a film on peace, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a stunning exploration of the influence of war on both Japanese and French culture and the conflict between love and inhumanity.
New Orleans, Mon Amour
Author: Andrei Codrescu
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565127900
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
A “lovely collection” of essays by the NPR commentator about his beloved adopted city, both before and after Hurricane Katrina (Publishers Weekly). NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has long written about the unique city he calls home. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots; the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable; and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu’s essays have been called “satirical gems,” “subversive,” “funny,” “gonzo,” and “wittily poignant”—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly’s on Decatur; does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras; befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics; and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost, but here Codrescu also writes about how the city’s heart still beats even after 2005’s devastating hurricane. New Orleans, Mon Amour is a portrait of an incomparable place, from a writer who “manages to be brilliant and insightful, tough and seductive about American culture” (The New York Times Book Review). “Finely honed portraits of a fabled city and its equally fabled inhabitants. The author, who has called the Big Easy home for two decades, shows how, like some gigantic bohemian magnet, New Orleans attracts some of the world’s most talented, self-indulgent freaks. Codrescu finds himself quite at home there. He expertly weaves pages of New Orleans history through his stories of personal discovery and debauchery. . . . Readers can’t help coming away from reading it without an abiding hope in the ability of ordinary people, under the worst circumstances, rising to whatever challenges they face.” —Publishers Weekly
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565127900
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Book Description
A “lovely collection” of essays by the NPR commentator about his beloved adopted city, both before and after Hurricane Katrina (Publishers Weekly). NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has long written about the unique city he calls home. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots; the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable; and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu’s essays have been called “satirical gems,” “subversive,” “funny,” “gonzo,” and “wittily poignant”—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly’s on Decatur; does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras; befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics; and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost, but here Codrescu also writes about how the city’s heart still beats even after 2005’s devastating hurricane. New Orleans, Mon Amour is a portrait of an incomparable place, from a writer who “manages to be brilliant and insightful, tough and seductive about American culture” (The New York Times Book Review). “Finely honed portraits of a fabled city and its equally fabled inhabitants. The author, who has called the Big Easy home for two decades, shows how, like some gigantic bohemian magnet, New Orleans attracts some of the world’s most talented, self-indulgent freaks. Codrescu finds himself quite at home there. He expertly weaves pages of New Orleans history through his stories of personal discovery and debauchery. . . . Readers can’t help coming away from reading it without an abiding hope in the ability of ordinary people, under the worst circumstances, rising to whatever challenges they face.” —Publishers Weekly
Signposts in a Strange Land
Author: Walker Percy
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312254193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450
Book Description
At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312254193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450
Book Description
At his death in 1990, Walker Percy left a considerable legacy of uncollected nonfiction. Assembled in Signposts in a Strange Land, these essays on language, literature, philosophy, religion, psychiatry, morality, and life and letters in the South display the imaginative versatility of an author considered by many to be one the greatest modern American writers.
The World That Made New Orleans
Author: Ned Sublette
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569765138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
STRONGNamed one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune. STRONGWinner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.STRONG STRONGAwarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008. New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance. The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans's first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana's statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, &“rock the city.&” This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette's previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569765138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
STRONGNamed one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune. STRONGWinner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.STRONG STRONGAwarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008. New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance. The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans's first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana's statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, &“rock the city.&” This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette's previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.
The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans
Author: Andrei Codrescu
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312135706
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
In twenty-six essays, Codrescu turns his skeptical, amused gaze to such topics as Plato's effect on American sex, the cultural meaning of Ed McMahon, baseball's literary underpinnings, his own conception in a Romanian darkroom, an cuisine under the Ceausescu dictatorship, as well as to larger subjects, including the suicide of communism, American culture and politics, and his adopted city of New Orleans.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312135706
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
In twenty-six essays, Codrescu turns his skeptical, amused gaze to such topics as Plato's effect on American sex, the cultural meaning of Ed McMahon, baseball's literary underpinnings, his own conception in a Romanian darkroom, an cuisine under the Ceausescu dictatorship, as well as to larger subjects, including the suicide of communism, American culture and politics, and his adopted city of New Orleans.
The Poetry Lesson
Author: Andrei Codrescu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 124
Book Description
"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 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.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691178054
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 124
Book Description
"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 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.