The usefullness of Fairhaven's stairwells

Read poetry in one of Fairhaven’s many stairwells yesterday:

By flat tink
or tin, or thin
copper tong
brass clang
bronze bong*

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Where else but in Fairhaven could you sit in a dim and drafty stairwell and recite poetry? Put like that, it sounds dismal, but I honestly love those stairwells; the shadow of rain falling through window , the resonance and echoing acoustics …perfectly atmospheric for reciting poetry focused on sound. Every alliteration and assonance was amplified and accentuated by the stairwell’s hollow depths.

…so maybe I’m dramatizing the atmosphere of Fairhaven’s stairwells, but they served their purpose: a place to read, listen and feel the poetry.

Class began with a cookie. Let me explain—it’s not uncommon for Mary Cornish (an especially excellent poet, person and professor at Fairhaven College) to begin the first day of class by reading about the sweetness of learning. Of course, for any of us especially intelligent college-goers, such things need validation. Thus the cookie.

And with cookie in hand, we embarked upon the study—no, the experience—of Poetry and Sound (the title of the course). Started off with a video by Evelyn Glennie (an amazing solo percussionist) about the importance of listening. Later, we broke into small groups to read poems and discuss their play with sound.

And ever since class finished, I’ve been splashing in puddles, listening to the way my hair-in-the-wind sounds like the rustle of thin metal filaments and so on…after I made it to the house I share with five other girls, about 3.5 miles from campus, I practiced my drum set for two and a half-ish hours, listening to how the vibrations and the sound of the drums spoke, just playing them in weird ways.

It’s this that I love about Fairhaven. I’m not simply going to class, studying, sleeping eatingbreathingexisting during every insipid moment of the day. No. I’m living—my passions intersect with my academics and not in an overburdened, suffocated way. It’s more of a harmony.

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*Bell, by Valerie Worth

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