A Nick at a Time
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| Doesn’t it look like fun? (Photo by Nick McAvoy) |
They had better things to do.
Chalk is a favorite advertising medium at Penn. It’s not unusual to find chalked messages on the Walk endorsing anything from student government candidates to a capella auditions to the latest Penn-geared web site.
But poetry?
You may have been surprised Monday morning to find the Walk adorned with words stretching from Huntsman Hall most of the way down to the compass. If you took the time to read them, you noticed verse from such varied poets as T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Li Bai, and Oscar Wilde.
So who were the vandals? Who dared to cover our dull red bricks with beautiful reflections of the human condition, with no apparent self interest in mind? Riding my bike home at 2:30 Monday morning, I was lucky enough to catch the culprits. With chalk in one hand and printouts in the other, the three friends steadily scrawled their chosen stanzas down the walkway.
College sophomore Maura Krause and Engineering sophomores Derek X. Ma and Lorna Ng’eno live together in King’s Court. Their motivations were not grand or especially well thought out.
“We were bored,” Ng’eno said.
“No reason,” Ma added.
Krause elaborated, though not much. “I wanted to do something crazy and I was in a poetry frame of mind.”
In short, the poetry seems the impulsive outburst of an unorthodox collection of friends. But every night there are thousands of groups of bored friends at Penn, all of whom were brought here because of their considerable gifts and unique passions. Why do we not see more such expressions of them?
“I think there are people who want this kind of romanticism,” Krause later reflected. It’s “the beauty of doing something completely useless and beautiful, and not what you’re supposed to be doing.”
The students have few specific hopes for the reaction of the Penn student body at large. “I was joking that Wharton kids might grow a heart if they see some poetry,” Ng’eno said. “I hope they read them and get inspired or something, or whatever poems do to people.”
Ma was even simpler. “Maybe it will be pleasant to read some poetry on their way to class,” he said.
It’s not that their time couldn’t have been better spent reading, or doing homework, or sleeping, for that matter. It’s not that they had an urgent message to send the Penn community. It’s that poetry is beautiful, and it’s fun to stay up late on a Sunday night to tell us so.
These friends will remember their midnight escapade for some time. We have four years at Penn to develop our gifts amid many of the most talented and diverse people we will ever meet. If more of our free time were spent expressing them, campus life might be a lot less boring.
A Nick at a Time appears every Tuesday and Thursday.
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September 19th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
From my Penn Reading Project book freshman year, (yes, I am one of the few who read it) I think I recall that Ben Franklin, in establishing the school, recognized the impossibility of teaching students anywhere near the information available to them. Instead, he exhorted Penn to teach only that which is “most useful” and “most ornamental.” While it may be (in the creator’s own wording) useless, I think the poetry on the walk struck solidly into the realm of most ornamental. Franklin might not be the ultimate reference even at Penn, but I, for one, was delighted.
September 28th, 2007 at 12:20 am
i just might to try something like that. maybe i’ll write out some organic mechanisms somwewhere. or a p-chem proof. though that would take up probably take up all of locust walk and then some, so i’ll stick to my benzene rings