I’m reading another book, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse, by Thomas C. Foster.

Since he’s a University Professor, he knows more than I do. But he’s fun to read, a real wag, or, as he says, quippy. I recommend the book highly for its select audience.

When I read, in Chapter 8 of the section How Is Poetry?, “Look Who’s Talking”, I find he deals with something that I wrote awhile back about the dangers of assuming the speaker in a poem or novel is the author because it says “I.”

Foster goes deeper and digs in, with quoted references to others, and insists on making me learn. It’s humbling at the same time that it’s inspiring.

I mean, I would never say, “the poem…is written in scrupulous decasyllabics.”

But then he ends that chapter, “Rhyme Thyme,” with a reference to the famous dictum that nothing rhymes with “orange.” We know that, have heard it often, as people have tried and gave up.

But immediately springs to mind the coupling “strange orange” and “orange binge,” a “strange binge on the fringe of the orange range” or “an orange binge on the strange range,” or…not a rhyme, but a near-rhyme, an off-rhyme, which allows me to take the high ground.

Who says a retired high school English teacher can’t read write think with the best of them? Not I.

Having struck a blow for democracy, now I need to read the rest of the book.

Even high school English teachers, even ordinary citizens, can read write think.