the GOT bike

 In the fall of my senior year as an English major, I enrolled in my first class with "poetry" in the title. Sure, I'd read verse in various classes, but I had a strong preference for prose, and I could have graduated without taking a specific poetry class, but for the teaching certificate I was pursuing, the school required a more well rounded curriculum, which also had me take a linguistics class I thought was well and truly niffy. For me, poetry was a much bigger challenge than linguistics, and I was a wee daunted after the first day when Professor Mariani introduced the class by saying that modern poetry, the focus of the class, was the most obscure to understand. Added to that, he tried to further cull the field by saying he considered good work, without error, that satisfied all the requirements deserved a B, and an A was warranted only for exceptional performance. Well, I needed a poetry class, and that was the one that fit, so I stayed. I'm glad I did. For on...