Dada in the Classroom

Bring on the bongo drums and the black turtlenecks — this looks like fun. Students in a poetry class were asked to write their poetry on a piece of fruit, and then share their text with the class.

Melanie stood holding her Cassaba melon like a globe or Yorick’s skull in her left hand and read it slowly rotating it to see all the lines; she then passed the Cassaba around and everyone read a line; amazingly, there were exactly 13 circular lines on the melon; she then cut it open with a sharp folding knife of illegal dimensions (on an airplane, certainly) and passed slices that everyone ate like communion, there being present also an eerie, nearly sacerdotal silence. And so it went, fruit after fruit, read, performed, eaten, in an order that could have not been more perfect if Noah’s monitors had been there. We thus learned that: a) poetry can be edible (and perhaps it should be); b) fruit is a sexier medium than paper or pixels; c) school could be fun, d) “intermediate” could mean that even though the medium had not been quite reached (advanced), the closeness to experience itself (beginning), made it worthwhile, e) it’s not so easy to write on fruit without good magic markers, and f) T.S. Eliot need not be memorized. —Andrei Codrescu, Inside Higher Ed