I have a disclaimer to make: I’m a bit of a literary geek. In elementary school, I used to get yelled at for reading during recess. The yard aids used to tell me that recess wasn’t the time for reading. Why didn’t I want to get up and go play? I thought it was obvious -- reading was playing. 

I still think like that, although I no longer have the luxury of recess in which to indulge my literary geekdom. Instead, I enjoy my literature during classes and in snatches of free time on buses, while waiting for friends, and, occasionally, at poetry readings.

Tuesday night held a particular treat for the literary geek in me. I went to the first reading of IC’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, where I had the opportunity to hear Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz read from his latest book Failure and his soon-to-be-published book The God of Loneliness.

When I first arrived at college, I thought I would be going to events like this all the time. But as every college student knows, what you thought you'd be doing when you got here is rarely what ends up happening. I've gone to a lot of great events in my past year at IC, but this was my first poetry reading.

As IC writing professor Jerry Mirskin said in his introduction of Schultz, “There’s a special quality of air that hangs around a poetry reading.” He’s right -- there’s something magical about the atmosphere. I found myself drawn not only to Schultz's poems, but also to the absolute quiet that occurred as he paused between poems. All I could hear was page turning and the quiet breath of the people next to me. (Remarkably, I heard very few coughs over the course of the evening. Perhaps the writing department has a secret formula for staying healthy that the rest of Ithaca College has yet to discover. Ideas, anyone?) The silence was, to quote a poem of Schultz's that he read that night, "a scintillating and perplexing music I did not expect to hear." The poems themselves were, of course, fascinating, partly because of the anecdotes that Schultz told during breaks between. My favorite story was one he told about the inspiration for the title poem for his next book, God of Loneliness. Schultz told us that the poem came from standing in line to buy his sons a Wii, back when they first came out. I was delighted to find out that if I ever become a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, I too, can participate in the popular technology crazes.

I came out of the reading feeling like I had given my parents one more good reason to keep paying for my college education. Hopefully, I'll be giving them even more reasons by attending the next two readings in the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series.

Charles Baxter
National Book Award Finalist in Fiction
Public Reading
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
7:30p.m., Clark Lounge, Egbert Hall

Jo Ann Beard
Acclaimed Essayist
Public Reading
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
7:30p.m., Klingenstein Lounge, Egbert Hall

I hope to see you all there.