Time for Re-Verse, Sigma Tau Delta style.

Last April, several people in the Department of English and Foreign Languages met to plan a new event, a poetry recitation. Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society, sponsored the event and the experiment was born on a rainy Thursday night. Eleven people read, including students and professors. In planning this year's recitation, STD decided to move it to the fall semester.

This is the story of Re-Verse. The beginning, anyway. The second chapter occurs on November 18, a Monday at 6:30 p.m. in the Buddy Green Room in the MCC on the Cameron University campus.

The event is open to the the public and anyone can recite a poem as long as they sign up in advance. This year you can speak to Dr. William Carney if you want to recite a poem. Email him at wcarney at cameron dot edu.

You can recite one poem. The poem must by written by anyone other than yourself. Last year, someone recited a poem written by his niece. Dr. Seuss is fair game. So is Chaucer, Shelley, and Plath. Poems not in English ARE ENCOURAGED ENTHUSIASTICALLY. It doesn't matter if no one else speaks Sanskrit; poetry is also about rhythm and sound, and those things can be understood in any language.

Price of admission is a can of food, to be donated by STD to the Lawton Food Bank. Please join us for an evening of fun, friends, and poetry.

Re-Verse Recap (March 11, 2010)

The first annual Re-Verse is completed. I use the word "annual" because we're definitely doing this again. It was too much fun to let it fade away into the Lawton fog. We had about 25 people show up and Amber Harrington, Sigma Tau Delta's president, said it was the best attended event STD has hosted all year.

I wish I didn't ramble on so much at the beginning with introductions, but no one ran away screaming. Anyway, we had both faculty and students read. Next year, we hope to increase our presenters to 30, with people participating from both Cameron and the Lawton/Southwerstern OK community.

Highlights... Drs. John Morris, William Carney, Ginette Baillergeon, and Vivian Tomlinson all gave us great poems performed passionately. Dr. Baillergeon, in particular, wowed us with two poems, one in French. She recited a longer poem by Carl Sandburg and reminded us that not all Sanburg poems are four lines long. Both of her poems were long ones and I don't think she faltered once.

Several students read, both English majors and students from other disciplines. All together, eleven people read a poem each and not one person had a difficult time reciting their work. Not one. I've been to recitation events before, and I've never seen one without a few long pauses. Long pauses are perfectly fine in such a difficult situation, but the fact that there was not one at our event is very impressive.

Also, we contributed lots of food to the Lawton Food Bank. This was Amber's idea and it is a good one. Future events only mean further donations. We are considering a fall date for next year's even (maybe a bi-annual thing) simply because we don't want to wait twelve months to do this again.