Letters to Juliet

Letters to Juliet: 5/14

Watching old people fall in love is … cool. OK, admit it — you became generally uninterested in The Notebook after Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling aged and became less glamorous. Letters to Juliet might suffer the same fate. In the film, an old woman attempts to reconnect with her former flame from the 1950s in Verona, Italy, with help from Amanda Seyfried and Christopher Egan. Seyfried and Egan, however, seem to have the charm to give this tale of years-gone-by, unrequited love some spark.



- By Sara Wakefield

MFA Poetry Reading

Last Wednesday, May 6, I was fortunate enough to attend the final reading of the graduating the poetry MFA program. It's nationally recognized as one of the best programs in the country, but it mostly goes under the radar around Grounds. This is regrettable as students are missing out on some incredible readings by very talented and thoughtful people.

This past week's reading was truly memorable and left me excited to see where the people in the program take their lives and poetry. Below I've posted one of the poems read by soon-to-be-graduate Sam Taylor, who has already published one book of poems. This link contains MP3's for each of the five readers. My favorites were Jazzy Danziger-Loyal's "The Psychiatrist’s Teen Daughter Self Evaluates" and Taylor's new poem, "Book of Poems" (which appear at 7:20 on Danziger-Loyal's MP3 and 11:40 on Taylor's). Check them out, come to readings next year.

SONG: INFERNAL


I was lost in the middle of my life
when the planes hit the towers,
lost in the middle of my life
when the glass gods, one at a time, cowered

and fell, when a bomb of blue sky
exploded a bride where she stood—
I was lost in the middle of my life,
far from a leopard, far from a dark wood—

when the night clerk at Circle K
handed me back too much change,
I was lost in the middle of our life’s way,
when an army of wings arranged

on flatbed trucks brushed past me on the road,
I was lost in the hallways of a glass dream,
trying to find my way out to the ground
turning in circles, crying secretly

in green languages, unknown even to me—
far from a lion, far from a dark wood—
with armfuls of fritos, and ribs, and iced tea,
and web pages circling through my blood.

There were wires all around, and siren wails
and people running about, bereft and intent
as I. I didn’t know whether to stay still
and wait for my life to grow transparent

there in my chair, with the sprinklers overhead
like golden showers of sorrow
and emergency lights flashing red
up and down the hall

or whether to run madly from stairwell
to stairwell, kissing women’s knees
and the foreheads of men, drunk on cries for help
beseeching and singing and weeping

entering one life after another
and leaping from each one. Yes, I
was lost in the middle of the tower
when I came upon my life.