By Omolemo Kale
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
David Bergman knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer.
Whether he was home with his parents or at school, the now retired Towson University English professor remembers how he would practice his prose and experiment with poetry.
“People used to love my writing when I was in grade school,” Bergman said in a recent interview.
He loved writing so much that he studied it in college, wrote or edited 20 books of scholarly work and poetry, and eventually became a seminal figure in LGBTQ literature.
Now in his mid-70s and living with Parkinson’s Disease, Bergman was awarded the 2025 Towson Prize for Literature this fall for his recent book of poetry Plain Sight, which examines such issues as aging, disease, love and friendship.
He was formally recognized for his work during an Oct. 29 event on TU’s campus, when Bergman read selected works.
“I have lots of people to thank,” Bergman said before the reading, singling out several friends and organizers of the event. “Thank you for choosing Plain Sight as the winner. I want to thank the hundreds of students I’ve had over the years who’ve taught me so much about language and life.”
He began the reading with the title poem “Plain Sight” before moving on to other short passages of many poems he had written over the years. When the reading segment concluded, he took questions from the audience. Most of his answers lead into a wise allegory or playful humor.
“You should have taken classes with me,” he said at one point. “That’s how my class were. I would tell stories, I would tell jokes, I would talk about and read poems. And read the novels we were studying or read the non-fiction we were studying and talk about them. Usually get the students to answer questions but it was a whole discussion. It was a whole world.”
Several of his former students attended the event to pay tribute to a man they said changed their lives.
“Dr. Bergman’s class changed how I viewed the study of poetry, how I read poetry, and where I began writing poems myself,” said Conor Reynolds, who was a student of Bergman’s a decade ago. “His impact on me, both as a student and a person, was in making poetry approachable by showing how its elements are both technical and deeply human.”
Bergman said during an interview that it was his public school teachers and college professors who helped him improve his writing.
He singled out one specific teacher – “Mr. Morris” from junior high school – who he called a special person and probably his biggest inspiration to being a poet.
“He was certainly the person who taught me how to write poetry,” Bergman said.
Bergman went to the now closed Parkway High School in New York. It was there in the 1970s where Bergman was introduced to authors like W. H Auden or Thomas Mann. He even had one teacher who made Bergman and the students read pieces like Marcel Proust in French.
“I did some of my best reading in high school,” Bergman said.
At the time, Parkway was considered an experimental high school that pushed the students to take on advanced material in multiple aspects. Lucky enough for Bergman, reading W.H Auden made so much of an impression on him that he dedicated his senior thesis in college to writing about him.
After high school, Bergman went to Kenyon College in Ohio. At the time, it was known for having a great English department and for its famous “The Kenyon Review” founded by John Crowe Ransom. Bergman met him while he was still alive and got inspiration from him and other fellow poets.
“There were a number of students who were very interested in poetry, including [American poet] Daniel Mark Epstein,” Bergman said. “We became friends, and he was an enormous influence on me.”
Bergman then went to Johns Hopkins University, where he majored in English and got to study under writer Earl Waserman in the professor’s last years teaching romantic poetry.
“I learned so much from him,” Bergman said. “I learned about slowing down a poem. Taking a poem moment by moment. And the poem word by word. Slowly, not trying to race through it.”
From his time as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, Bergman went to Towson University to start his teaching career in 1974. Interweaving poetry and teaching was his ideal life in the late 70s.
He made great progress having his poetry published by big literary magazines like The Paris Review, which he discovered at the library one day. At the time, he said, the library played a key role in Bergman’s literary progression, teaching philosophy, and love life.
Bergman either wrote or edited over 20 books in his life. He taught at Towson until 2016.
Students who had Bergman say he could be a daunting figure at times, but he was a patient teacher who inspired.
“I was a little intimidated at first by the bow-tied, houndstooth jacket wearing professor,” said Quincey Johnson, who was an English student of Bergman’s in the early 1980s. “However, that changed when he showed his passion for poetry and teaching. He always started a critique with some praise for my scribblings before showing me ways I could improve.”
Bergman received the George Ellison Poetry Prize in 1985 for first book, Cracking the Code. Other books include Heroic Measures and Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature, which Baltimore magazine called “a seminal work of gay literary criticism.”
Bergman’s poetry has had a significant impact.
Current English senior Jean Paul Appel, for example, said during Bergman’s poetry reading at Towson last month that it was important for him to attend.
“Today meant a lot to me as a queer person,” Appel said. “Being able to hear the perspective, not just from a queer author, but from a queer elder. I take that very seriously and I really try to take everything that someone who is older and wiser than me has to offer. So, you can only get a lot of those things in person.”