I had never thought so obsessively about poetry as I did when I was learning about syntactic linguistics.

There were different kinds of verbs, my professor had told me. If John threw a ball, that throwing was a doing. But if John loved Mary, my professor stressed that, within the structure of the sentence, John served as what was called an “experiencer” of the emotion of love. Loving was not a doing — syntactically speaking, of course. He drew for us two diagrammatic trees that demonstrated how the nature of a doing or experiencing verb influenced how the sentence was modeled in our internal understanding of language.

There is poetry in constellations, and poetry in patterns of birdsong, but this class was how I learned about the poetry that inhabits the formal structures of language. Was the professor aware of the symphony he was plotting out on the blackboard? He was composing out loud a striking thesis on what it meant to perform the act of love, or, indeed, to simply be the experiencer of some cosmic feeling. I was desperate to learn more, especially if the professor continued to explain these concepts in a way that inadvertently sounded like a poetic proclamation.