April is National Poetry Month and, to celebrate, Robert Day (my teacher at Iowa, the man who walked into the classroom the first day and wrote across the length of the blackboard REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM) herewith offers a witty and casually erudite meditation on the poems of John Ashbery and Tadeusz Różewicz, this "chance encounter" taking place in a dining room in Kansas City. Yes, folks, in America today, despite all the narrowness, spleen and vitriol exhibited in the legislatures of the country, it is still possible to find a dining room in Kansas City where two people talk intelligently about poems, quote lines, and pass books back and forth across the table. Now if we could just spread the light.