VERY RARELY CAN a person recall the exact moment of the life-shattering mistake which ruined his or her life, and even more rarely can he or she pinpoint the exact moment when the reality of that mistake came crashing home. I can do both.

One fine spring day toward the end of my freshman year I picked up a pen and wrote the words "English and American Language and Literature" on a piece of paper.

The realization came one night at the very beginning of my sophomore year when I was invited to a cultural event in which my department could strut its stuff--a poetry reading. Although I had heard a great deal of praise for the reading poet, described to me as the "darling of the English Department," I did have some misgivings. The collection of works from which he was to read had been composed in his bathroom, "one poem per sitting," and was titled "Grunts." Nevertheless, I was determined to keep an open mind.

I was wrong. After a great deal of introduction and adulation, a short, middle-aged man who looked like a cross between Bozo and Einstein shuffled up onto the stage, mumbled something about critics being ants, and withdrew a well-worn copy of his latest work.

"My first poem is a political yet non-partisan piece I've appropriately titled `O Nicaragua!':

The hair on your breasts disgusts me

Yet draws me screaming to your altars

As a pig without credit; as a HORse without LOve.

Crustacean lips that would see

And phallic ears that would kiss, hear

Your downy bellows fill with milk.

That is no place for Tupperware!

Where callous cows sing dirty ditties

While Mad Matisse Dances Dostoyevski

And Pat Boone hangs howling on the creaking cross.