I took a poetry class my junior year of college and I loved it. I’d never really studied poetry before, unless you count having to memorize every word and punctuation mark in “No Man Is An Island,” which was apparently what my AP English teacher in high school thought counted as studying poetry. Our professor, Herbert Lindenberger, was the type of awesome prof you sometimes get who’s a distinguished scholar in his field, but also a man who clearly relishes teaching and words, as you could tell from the way he’d read to us in class. I can still hear in my mind his reading of Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” bringing such breathless bravura to the lines, “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course/With rocks, and stones, and trees,” that you could forget that it was a poem about premature death. Even the unsexual poems became sexual…or maybe it just sounded that way to me because I was 19. (He is apparently now Professor Emeritus. I love that he has a Twitter page, which he has barely used, with a bio that says, “When you reach 85, 142 characters just isn’t enough room, so let’s leave it at that!”)
The Flea
The Flea
The Flea
I took a poetry class my junior year of college and I loved it. I’d never really studied poetry before, unless you count having to memorize every word and punctuation mark in “No Man Is An Island,” which was apparently what my AP English teacher in high school thought counted as studying poetry. Our professor, Herbert Lindenberger, was the type of awesome prof you sometimes get who’s a distinguished scholar in his field, but also a man who clearly relishes teaching and words, as you could tell from the way he’d read to us in class. I can still hear in my mind his reading of Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” bringing such breathless bravura to the lines, “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course/With rocks, and stones, and trees,” that you could forget that it was a poem about premature death. Even the unsexual poems became sexual…or maybe it just sounded that way to me because I was 19. (He is apparently now Professor Emeritus. I love that he has a Twitter page, which he has barely used, with a bio that says, “When you reach 85, 142 characters just isn’t enough room, so let’s leave it at that!”)