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Do you have a favorite poem? If so, why not read it at Wednesday’s Favorite Poem Reading held in the Williams Center for the Arts at 12 p.m.
The program is the brainchild of former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who founded the Favorite Poem Project in 1997. This is Lafayette’s second reading. The first one was held Nov. 2001 when Pinsky was on campus to give the keynote lecture of the Roethke Humanities Festival.
The original program had about 40 readers and Allison Quensen Blatt, advisor of the Lafayette College Arts Society, believes there will be a similar turnout on Wednesday.
Lafayette students, faculty and employees are invited to read and the deadline to sign up is tonight at midnight. Those who would like to read should contact student organizer Ben Flath ’07, a chemical engineering major, at flathb@lafayette.edu or Blatt at blatta@lafayette.edu.
Everyone from the public is invited to attend. A soup and salad lunch is available for $3.
“We consider [the reading] a complement to the other National Poetry Month programming on campus,” says Blatt. “The other events focus on original poetry and offer students the opportunity to present and share their own work. The Favorite Poem Reading focuses on the enjoyment of poetry as a reader rather than as a writer, and highlights the importance of poetry in people’s lives. The Arts Society is considering making the Favorite Poem Reading one of our annual events.”
Readers must read a published work which is not their own, not a song lyric, and not a passage from a religious book and must keep the reading to five minutes. Readers can also submit their favorite poem to the project’s online database at www.favoritepoem.org.