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Local poets all ready to rumble

Consider: In the current issue of the journal The American Scholar, poet Douglas Goetsch writes about being asked to lead a "drive-by poetry" field trip composed of New Jersey high school students.

The concept "entails loading the students into a van, cruising around and pulling over near targeted pedestrians. One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades -- or accosts -- the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window and the van takes off in search of the next victim."