Lenson is a professor and the program director of the comparative literature department at the University of Massachusetts. He currently teaches two classes: CompLit 131: “Brave New Worlds” and a 500-level course called “Modern Poetry and Poetics.” He has written five books: “On Drugs,” “The Birth of Tragedy,” “Ride the Shadow,” “The Gambler” and “Achilles’ Choice.”

As a professor, Lenson is considered informative and thought-provoking. Lenson said he wants his students to take away from his classes “a willingness to reconsider their own values, even if they just confirm them, but just take a minute to question what [they] believe.”

Lenson is a 65-year-old intellectual with a love for music and a penchant for overlooking standards, whether they are in regards to profanity or class size. A tall man with a slouchy posture, Lenson is often wearing a buttoned-down shirt with a slightly oversized sport coat. His hairline has receded to the sides of his head where the hair that remains is salt-and-pepper colored.

Many of his students say they appreciate his outgoing nature and style of teaching.

“He’s outspoken and interesting, and he doesn’t conform to lecture standards. He says whatever he wants,” Jake Bissaro, a sophomore enrolled in Lenson’s Brave New Worlds course.

“I’d like to go out to a bar with him and just listen to his stories from his past,” said Tim Allessio, another student taking Lenson’s course.

Veronica Nguyen, also enrolled in Brave New Worlds, said Lenson is “funny” and “kind of brilliant.”

“I hear from old students all the time, and that’s the best thing when somebody emails you 15 years later and still remembers [class],” Lenson said.

“He’s a cool guy,” said UMass student Dave Haber. “I just don’t agree with most of his views.” Haber also added that he enjoys the course material, despite the difference in his viewpoints from Lenson’s.

“He is the perfect blend of erudite professor and crazy 60s artist-slash-activist,” said Andres Wilson, one of Lenson’s teaching assistants. Wilson continued to say that most students get caught up in this persona and don’t realize he has compassion for his students and really cares about them.

Several of Lenson’s students, like Bissaro, view him first and foremost as a man who has “probably done a lot of drugs.”

This is appropriate, because when asked in a recent interview which of his books was his favorite, Lenson replied, “Oh, the drug book, absolutely. Sure.”

Lenson considers “On Drugs,” “the cult book that made [me] briefly famous,” to be his greatest achievement. “It tried to be different than all the other drug books by approaching the subject from the user’s perspective,” said Lenson.

“Except for like drug memoirs and trip reports and that kind of thing, that hadn’t been done in a sort of more rigorous way before.”

“Second favorite would be the second book of poems which I still like. The other two are academic books. The one that got me tenure: “Achilles’ Choice,” and there’s then a second one, a book on Nietzsche that got me promoted. You just have to do those to play the game professionally,” said Lenson.

In addition to Lenson’s accomplished writing career, the professor is a successful musician. Lenson has been playing saxophone in a blues band called the Reprobates for the last six years and has played with such musicians as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Buddy Guy, but his musical career began much earlier.

“I’ve been doing it since I was 14 – playing music for money – so, I’m like, I’m either an unsuccessful professional or a very successful semi-professional,” said Lenson. “I can’t quite decide which one.”

“I was out of it for most of the 60s, because nobody wanted sax players. After the British invasion it was like guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar … everybody had guitar bands,” said Lenson.

“Until 1970 when the Rolling Stones came out with ‘Exile on Main Street’ and they had Bobby Keys as the sax player on it and then ‘BANGO!’ I was working again. It was great; I owe Bobby Keys a drink sometime,” continued Lenson.

Lenson said that he chose saxophone because when he was a child, the popular music of the 1950s often featured saxophone.

“Some of the best musicians in town were sax players and sax players frequently fronted bands … so it was the prestige instrument and I wanted to play it,” said Lenson.

Lenson’s mother, however, felt differently. She made him take clarinet lessons until the day that Lenson took the $45 he had saved up throughout elementary school and bought a saxophone.

“It was so long ago that I could actually buy a sax for $45, and I played that sax for a long time. I didn’t get rid of it ‘til ’74,” Lenson said proudly.

He went on to talk about his current band, the Reprobates. They are a New England-based blues band. “It’s fun. It’s a hard-working band. In fact, I’ve had some insane years in recent years. In 2006, I played 161 gigs, which is like,” he chuckled, “stupid.”

“I think that what’s nice about music is, one, immediate creation and immediate reaction. When you write a poem, even if you get it published right away, it won’t be out for a year and you don’t get the reaction of the readers usually, but, you know, when you’re playing music, you do it right then and they react right then,” said Lenson.

“The other thing is that music, because it’s a combination of emotion and mathematics at the same time … it’s the only thing in my life that has a spiritual dimension to it,” Lenson continued. “It’s like a spiritual quest. And you wouldn’t think so, given the, you know, vulgar kind of music I’m playing, but it really is.”

Lenson’s love for music is further applied to the radio show that he hosts with Roger Fega at WMUA. The show is called MR2 and focuses on, at a basic level, visual, literary and musical artists.

According to MassReview.org, the show’s topics include, “the blues, bookbinding, painting, publishing, literature, nudity, the majesty of catalpa trees, marijuana, Disney, perversion, animals, weaponry, binaural recording, book design, contemporary poetry, ancient Athenian sex strikes, war protest, media criticism, sculpture, sexuality, food, intellectual stimulation, baseball.”

When asked about his favorite interview on the radio show, Lenson fell silent for a few minutes. Finally he thought of Peter Coyote, an actor who has been in both film and television.

“What his current generation of fans may not realize is that he was one of the founders of the whole counter culture, with the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the very earliest days and he wrote this incredible memoir about it, called, ‘Sleeping Where I Fall,’” said Lenson.

“After the memoir came out I just wrote him this gushy letter, and I was surprised that he answered me. We stayed in correspondence for a while,” said Lenson.

“Then one year, the book was technically out of print, but one year I managed to wangle copies at a reduced price and I taught it in 131. And, so, that semester I interviewed him… It was a very nice interview. It might’ve been my favorite,” said Lenson.

In spite of Lenson’s many accomplishments, including his band, his books, his radio show and the impression he’s made on his students, he speaks very humbly of his achievements.

“I have a great many failures. When you try to do a lot of things not everything works, so I mean in a way that’s just the price of trying,” said Lenson.

Lauren Scrima can be reached at [email protected].