Today’s column is about La Verne’s first poet laureate, Catherine Henley-Erickson. Her name may be familiar to Claremont readers: She reviews movies for the Claremont Courier.

The Claremont resident, a retired University of La Verne professor, has freelanced reviews for the paper since 1984.

I couldn’t resist asking if she’d ever combined her two passions and reviewed a movie in verse.

“One time I reviewed one of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare movies, I forget which one, and I did do it in blank verse, in sentence form,” Henley-Erickson told me. “Nobody picked up on it.”

By my troth! And here I thought I was asking a joke question.

“She always tells me if a movie is worth seeing,” her husband, Joe, chimed in. “If it is, we go together and she sits through it again.”