Yes, I am getting rid of books today. And yes, some of those books are about poetry. Some are even written by famous poets and critics. But you know what?--I need more space for the stuff that matters to me, such as the complete letters of Virginia Woolf, an eight-volume facsimile of the 1912 edition of the diaries of Lewis and Clark, and a giant Herodotus' Histories that I didn't know I owned but found stuffed behind Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Therefore, if you or your friends would like a perky explanation of how to fall in love with poetry, by all means let me know. I've decided to fall in love with poetry without aid from the manual. Similarly, I can offer you instructional tomes that explain everything you need to know about Shakespeare's sonnets as well as several other classic works of verse that are too complex for regular people to negotiate on their own.

Or perhaps you, too, have an antipathy to tour guides.

Just looking at these books makes me crabby. Why were they on my shelf for so many years? Because the authors were Experts, and if you want to know what I mean by Expert, go read Mark Twain's "Taming the Bicycle." You'll see how hard they are to ignore.

[I'm not as grumpy as I sound. I'm really not grumpy at all. My children, on the other hand, are very grumpy. They wanted a snow day and didn't get one, whereas I wanted a day to get rid of books and I did get one. Now, if that snowstorm would hurry up and arrive, I could also get out of driving to the dentist.]