The Library just wrapped up a celebration of National Poetry Month, during which daily pop-up poetry readings were held under Alexander Calder’s Red Fossils mobile in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library. Every weekday at noon, a student, faculty, or staff member read a favorite—or sometimes, an original—poem to an appreciative audience. Readers from across campus shared poems that resonated with them, a surprisingly intimate and often profoundly moving experience for the listeners. Those of us who “took ten” to hear a reading can testify to the enduring power of poetry; see the list of the readers and their chosen poems below. The series was dedicated to the memory of Professor of English Celeste Goodridge, who passed away in March.
Our thanks to all who participated!
| Date | Reader | Title/Class Year | Poem Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2 | Charlotte Daniels | Associate Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures | The Moose, Elizabeth Bishop |
| April 3 | Sabrina Hunte | 2020 | Generations, Sabrina Hunte |
| April 4 | Anna MacLean | 2019 | I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth |
| April 5 | June Lei | 2018 | Cadmium Red, June Lei |
| April 6 | Parker Lemal-Brown | 2018 | Scratch Draft Manifesto, Parker Lemal-Brown |
| April 9 | Hailey Beaman | 2018 | Song of the Statue, Rainer Maria Rilke |
| April 10 | Sarah Bay-Cheng | Professor of Theater & Dance | Play, Gertrude Stein |
| April 11 | Michael Reed | Senior Vice President for Inclusion and Diversity | The Mask, Maya Angelou |
| April 12 | Karl Maria Fattig | System & Digital Initiatives Librarian | Le spectre de la rose, Theophile Gauthier, from Poesies diverses, 1833-1838 |
| April 13 | Daniel Rechtschaffen | 2018 | Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas |
| April 16 | Clayton Rose | President | A Couple, Carl Sandburg |
| April 17 | Leana Amaez | Associate Dean of Students for Diversity & Inclusion | Ode to My Socks, Pablo Neruda |
| April 18 | Guy Mark Foster | Associate Professor of English | American Wedding, Essex Hemphill |
| April 19 | Martina Duncan | Registrar | In the Basement of the Goodwill Store, Ted Kooser |
| April 20 | Shinhee Kang | 2018 | America, Allen Ginsberg |
| April 23 | Matt O’Donnell | Editor, Bowdoin Magazine | Nate Brown is Looking for a Moose, Matthew Olzmann |
| April 24 | Helen Ross | 2018 | As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden |
| April 25 | Sakura Christmas | Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies | An excerpt of the first book (titled “The Jetavana Temple”) of the very long epic poem, Heike monogatari (Tales of the Heike). It was orally transmitted about events in Japan at the end of the twelfth century, and compiled and written down sometime before 1330. As a result, there is no author. |
| April 26 | Sebastian Urli | Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Spanish | Ternera acosada por tábanos,by peruvian poet Blanca Varela and One Art, Elizabeth Bishop |
| April 27 | Joachim Homann | Museum of Art Curator | An Anna Blume, Kurt Schwitters |
| April 30 | Slam poets Katherine Chi and Sanura McGill | 2019, 2020 | White Porcelain, Katherine Chi; Those Winter Sundays, Robert Hayden and Gone, Sanura McGill |