As I listened to the rain pouring on outside, I counted the people slowly trickling into the A.D. White House’s Guerlac Room. The mood was quiet but anticipatory, as the original few were joined by a final flurry of spectators as the start of the event approached.

Prof. Emeritus M.H. Abrams spoke in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium last Thursday about the Fourth Demension of poetry: enunciation.

 “It’s a pleasure to be a teacher,” said Professor Levitsky, nutritional science and psychology.  Levitsky has been at Cornell since 1968 – that’s over 40 years! But Levitsky was not always on this path. “I didn’t want to go to college; I wanted to be a TV repair man.”  Now, Levitsky writes poetry about the digestive system while studying the eating habits and nutrition of university students. 

Find out what a famous poet's ideal super power would be, what books he would pick if stranded on a desert island and more.

Three-person tables, dimmed lighting and mocktails made RPCC’s multipurpose room reminiscent of a New York City poetry club Friday night. The occasion was the “Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace” poetry slam hosted by the Delta Sigma Theta, Sorority Inc., part of “Delta Week” –– an annual series of fundraising events.

Poet Martha Collins kicked off the English Department’s Reading Series this past Thursday with readings from her book-length poem Blue Front, as well as some new works. The Reading Series has an impressive list of readers scheduled for this semester, and Martha Collins, who is currently serving as the “Distinguished Visiting Writer” to Cornell University, was a great way to get started. Collins has authored four collections of poetry, as well as Blue Front, two chapbooks (a pocket-sized book), and co-translated two books from Vietnamese.

According to Bruce George, executive producer of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, true success means doing “something you eat, drink, sleep and breathe.” George’s lecture last night in Warren Hall, sponsored by BOLD, centered on finding one’s path in life and achieving true success.

BOP: The North Star is an original play (premiered at the Kitchen Theater Sunday evening!) written and directed by Emilie Stark-Menneg. It was created through a collaborative process involving the actors, musicians and dancers in the play, as well as with Cornell English professor Prof. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, upon whose poetry the play is based. The play incorporates six poems from Professor Van Clief-Stefanon’s newest collection of poetry, Open Interval, recently nominated for a National Book Award. The focal poem, which returns several times in the 60-minute play, is entitled (can you guess?) “Bop: The North Star.”

Snowscape: A Series of Portraits, an installation by Mollie Miller ’10, currently in Tjaden Gallery, is not for the faint of heart. The works, which include photography, lithography, drawing, painting and video, will require your full attention and some serious study. The installation follows the stanzas of Miller's poem, titled “Snowscape,” giving equal weight to written text, large black-and-white photos and small, fast drawings. The installation culminates in two projections at the far end of the gallery.

It took a little bit of cajoling and self-conscious laughter at first. But by the end of the evening, each time Marc Bamuthi Joseph ended a stream of rhapsodic, rhythmic poetry with “word word,” the audience, as if cued by magic, came in with their response: “word word.”

In In The Spoken World, presented by the Kitchen Theater last weekend, Bamuthi journeyed through dazzling landscape of movement and sound, in a poetic exploration of what it means to be a part of a race, a family, and a community.