why teach poetry?
Poet Louis Ginsberg extolls the spiritual benefits of poetry and its study. It reminds people of the higher values that the human spirit longs for and which materialism tends to cloud. It pushes man to aspire for more altruistic goals in life. It is late at night and I cannot sleep. I start turning the pages of a current magazine, and suddenly I am confronted with a brief article on the death of Allen Ginsberg and a full-page picture of Allen and his father, Louis. I stare at the picture for a few moments, and suddenly my thoughts go reeling back fifty years to a living room in West Orange, New Jersey. The house belongs to my cousin Fanny Freiman. I am twenty-one years old, sitting on a couch and talking to her about my research for my doctoral thesis on…
