Love is like... pancakes
Students and faculty share love poems
Lauren Blais
Issue date: 2/3/10 Section: Campus Life
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"Love is like pancakes," Leslie Worthington recited, "Delicious/dripping butter and syrup...And definitely flat."
Students and faculty gathered Thursday in meeting room 1 to share their favorite love poems. But aside from the well-known lines of Emily Dickenson and Shakespeare, original compositions, such as Worthington's "Pancakes," were also shared by those present.
Kim Hightower's poem "Apollo's Sun" was inspired by a love interest.
"I had this crush on this guy," Hightower said. "When I usually have crushes, I put them on a pedestal."
As the narrator of the poem pines for her Apollo, Hightower alliterates to Greek mythology and romantic scenes of nature. Though the poem is metaphorical, Hightower is not afraid to show her true self.
"If I cloaked anything, the muses would kick my ass," she said. "I usually just kind of bare it all out."
PJ Davis' poem concerned a natural feature rather than a person.
"She's too cold this time of year/yet her beauty is still there," Davis said, reciting his poem about Lake Lanier. "Little ripples cross over her/as sailors cross her path."
Despite his romanticism of the lake, Davis said that "love poetry" wasn't really his thing.
"I'm not really a romantic writer," he said. "I like to write about nature, scenes."
Video conferencing cababilities allowed students from Oconee to participate. The two campuses took turns reciting original or published poems.
"It's sort of like a virtual poetic tennis match," Alex Johns said from the widescreen TV, garnering laughter from everyone in meeting room 1.
Alex Olvido chose to share the song "Sabor A Mí," an Eydie Gorme song with lyrics written by Alvaro Carrillo.
"(It was) a song that my mom loved that I grew up listening to quite a bit," he said.
Olvido said that he didn't understand meaning of the words until later, after his dad died. When returning to the west coast to help with the funeral arrangements, Olvido rediscovered the song. He later composed his own English translation called "A Trace of Me."
"I decided to try my hand at capturing the sentiment of the song in more poetic English, a process that led me to uncover the spiritual and reflective side of this song," Olvido later said in an e-mail.
"A thousand years or more may pass/A time love itself might not outlast/But then, just as now, with bated breath/You have a trace of me," Olvido said, concluding his translation of the song.
Faculty member Dottie Blais shared one of her original pieces.
"Let me preface this by saying that this was written for a contest," she said, "for the worst poetry."
Blais' poem "Like a Thief in the Night" tells of a lonely, unattractive woman who finds love in a burglar whom she has just shot. But while dying he delcares his love for another.
"Filled with regret, she could barely hear his last words 'ere he died/'Tell her I love her, the girl in the car parked outside.'"
Robbed of romance, each night thereafter the woman composes a short poem to place in the thief's sack, which she keeps hanging near her bed.
Blais' poem didn't win the contest for the worst poetry.
"It wasn't that bad," she said.
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