It was then that I knew I loved him. (If he wasn't gay, and also dead, he might be the Prince Charming I've been waiting for...)

Professor P lectured for the first hour about Hughes' biography, which is interesting and all, but we can easily look up his damn biography, so the lecture really didn't need to go on for as long as it did. The class really began to sparkle when we started diving into the poems themselves, dissecting the syncopation of Hughes' lines and the subtle sophistication of his lyric.

(That strikes me as an excruciatingly grad-student sentence I just wrote. And yet, it came absolutely naturally to me. Send help.)

We read "Montage of a Dream Deferred," a long sequence of poems that has his most often-anthologized poems in it: "Theme for English B" and "Harlem" (the one that goes: "What happens to a dream deferred? // Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun..." etc.). I never realized these two poems were part of a larger work.

I think that if I sit down and read "Montage of a Dream Deferred" about fifty times in a row, I will become a better poet. It's that brilliant. (I feel the same way about "The Wasteland," incidentally.) The way the poems jut up against each other gives me chills. Hughes' throwaway brilliance, the way he sets a mood, everything he leaves unsaid. I get goosebumps reading it.

I can't actually reproduce it for you; you're going to have to go and read it yourself. The poems don't work as well lifted from context. Except "Theme for English B" maybe, which is brilliant and entire, which is probably why it gets anthologized so much.

One interesting aspect of Hughes is the way his ego is removed from his poetics. He created a "Langston Hughes" public persona for himself, for one thing, and didn't even use it that often. The poem's "I" is often a stand-in for "the American Negro" and when it isn't, it becomes one or more of the men, women, and children of Harlem.

It's an interesting counterpoint to my own thesis work. I am so engaged with the "I" of the poem, and the personas tend to be nothing more than hypothetical versions of myself. Of course, I am writing about the body. My point of entry is naturally going to become my own body, therefore my self. Therefore most of the poems have an "I", and most of the Is are me, or at least me-esque.

I am not saying that what I am doing is lesser; it's simply the opposite of what Hughes was doing. Yet I know I can learn from Hughes all the same: rhythm and compression and omission. The man was amazing.

And now I have to read "Montage of a Dream Deferred" forty-nine or so times. It's a moral imperative.

Something cool. We were reading one of the Hughes poems and the girl sitting next to me said, "It's very haiku-like. It does just what a haiku is supposed to do-- it places the reader in a vivid time and location, and then has that small moment of surprise at the end." It was a very astute commentary, and while we were all nodding at her astuteness, she said, "I learned that in Mo's class!" Man, how cool is that?

Okay, okay, I get that that's what teaching is. You teach, and your students learn. That's sort of the way the system works. And yet, it surprised me all the same. I guess it hadn't occurred to me that I wasn't entirely playacting. That while teaching my class, I wasn't the only one who learned something.

It's a nice reinforcement, considering that very shortly I will be out there looking for teaching jobs. I'm working on my mantra. "I love teaching. I will be good at teaching. I will find a job. I am ready to embark upon my chosen career..."

Dear god, I'm really going to do this, aren't I?