At Charles University, classroom lectures on the breakdown of poetry, societies and breakdowns of languages flowed four weeks. The students of the University of Southern California's Summer Writing Program in Prague were surrounded with a new life, or a new way of living, learning not only the accent of 20th Century poetry but how to become one with living poetry.

On long walks through Old Town Square to outdoor cafés atop ancient cobblestone, the professor, like the greatest of guides, introduced seven students to live poetry. Students walked to the opera as the summer light, which seemed not to end, like the river Vltava and her motherly current, squeezed more time, turning time almost around. In the classroom, they ran through free verse, became the new Neo-Classicists, New Critics, and read, "Whatever it is, it avails not…distant avails not, and place avails not," (Whitman) by a sculpture of the innocent, atop Charles Bridge.

And even through rain and the sounds different rain can make, their conversations rose in places candlelit, beneath heavy, curved, grandfatherly stone, over meals, inviting all to bear witness a thousand years of knowledge, of creation and toasting to a thousand years of new creations and peace and art. Rain can last weeks in Eastern Europe.

Professor James Ragan kept insisting a welcome to live poetry that some tried to refuse, like the adventurers, feeling they had learned enough to take the doorway through. But he accepted them, and the city of Praha accepted them, all of them, let them stay. And it was done with the fragile balance of being and the study of scholarly letters. One may take it that education is natural this way, passing knowledge through living what is being taught.

Within the lectures the students listened to flux the "under real," looking to dreams for duty. Fleeting moments of few strokes painting the effects of substance fading cold fact home, buried to Nada, giving hope to landscapes while poets brought back to trial in cages alongside gorillas and condors; portmanteau, words colliding, breaking off and away to the naked perception, to mirror oneself. The need to intellectualize, the need for order due to unrest, fragmenting the world. And when the professor led the final at Vysehrad Cemetery along celebrated stone and raising wine, the students read their poetry to the dead artists, writers, composers and sacrificers who seem to be living among us, in us, beyond us, still astonishing every measured rhythm and every unscanned verse.

Is science God? Or was the symbolist right--Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud--by pushing farther into this most difficult world, powerless to do anything in the world while identity was too easy to lose and to give up? Is it safe to say imagination is God? But the students understood: The supreme fiction is poetry balancing the domain between what is real and what is fantasy. Sartre wrote, "Man alone is responsible for his existence." The students became aware of themselves so far from home, learning not to leave the world behind, married by tradition and free verse. They all went to see The Swan King in the evening and watched poetry in dance without a word spoken.