Rich Messeder

< Prev | Next >

I grew up - decades ago - on a small farm in a very rural part of Maine, spending much of my free time exploring the deep forest that surrounded my home, and attending a 2-room grammar school during the school year. It was an experience rich in color, sounds, texture, and adventure. I was fortunate to attend high school in a neighboring town, where I received an excellent education in English, Latin, and French. I love literature, and particularly enjoy reading, writing, and reciting poetry. (In fact, the license plates for both my automobile and my motorcycle are POET.)

"The perfect man? A poet on a motorcycle.
You know, the kind who lives on the edge, the free spirit.
But he's also gotta have the soul of a poet and a brilliant mind."
[*Lucinda Williams]

I am attending UNH in pursuit of a Ph. D. in Physics. I have taught at college and at high school in the past, and enjoyed both experiences. At the high school level, I worked with the school's forensics (speech) team, which became a major Class C contender in Interscholastic Forensics thanks to very hard-working and dedicated students. On one of the competition trips, I recall a student spying a spider doing, well..., spiderly things, I suppose, and, letting out a squeak of fright, the student sent the spider to the nether world. Having spent some pleasant interludes with a daddy long-legs or two, as well as the occasional tarantula, I was moved to wonder

What God has placed
Within the breast of one so fair
A heart of stone,
That thus concealed,
Should lure the innocent from his lair?
[*Richard Messeder]

The answer, at least for that individual and animals with more than four legs, might be found in a paraphrase of Emily Dickinson.

Though prince should kneel at her doorstep,
Though chariot pause at her low gate,
She shuts the door of her attention
Like stone.
[*Richard Messeder]

Contact Info

I'm not one to post my email address on the web for web crawlers to find. Instead, if you are a member of the UNH family, you can look me up in the directory, or try here Down East Engineering or here Sarah J. Farmer.

I created the Sarah J Farmer Digital Archives to help researchers find information about Sarah J. Farmer, a woman who lived in New England around the turn of the 1900s, and who is the only woman to have attended the 1905 signing of the peace treaty brokered by the United States that ended the war between Japan and Russia.