Poem in Your Pocket Day!

Today I attended GRF Sam’s Poem in Your Pocket Day event.  This was a really fun event celebrating a really cool holiday meant to encourage people to read and talk about poetry.  I have a little bit of poetry experience through both my English classes and various campus writing-related organizations that I am part of, but I am by no means a poetry expert.  It was interesting to hear about Sam’s experience with the poetry day event.  While this event was small, it was nice to be able to talk to others about a mutual interest.  I really enjoyed hearing people share some of their favorite poems and read them aloud.  There is something really magical about hearing poetry read aloud.  While I did not have any specific short poem to share off the top of my head, it was cool hearing what others had to share.  I talked about a fascinating poetry book called “Dance Dance Revolution” which I read in my Utopian literature class.  Another thing that we did was try to do blackout poetry with one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  If you don’t know, blackout poetry is when you take an existing poem or any type of writing and blackout a bunch of the words, leaving only some words behind that you use to make a new poem.  It was really fun to try this, even though my poem didn’t end up making much sense!  Overall, this event was a fun break from work where I got to talk about poetry with others!

2 thoughts on “Poem in Your Pocket Day!

  1. This sounds like such an entertaining and insightful experience! I have definitely developed an affinity for poetry over the last few years. I mostly engage with poems in my Spanish classes at Cornell and it is very interesting to see how the writing styles vary throughout languages. I definitely think blackout poetry is such a fun and unique approach to literature; a truly engaging and creative outlet.

  2. My high school celebrated Poem in your Pocket Day. Every year, I’d bring and share the same poem, “The Voice” by Shel Silverstein, my favorite poem of all time. The poem talks about following your gut; listening to that “voice” that resides in your head. I have this poem hanging in my room and I recall recite it often when it came time to deciding where I wanted to attend college. I’m glad I listened to my voice and chose Cornell 🙂