College of Arts and Sciences

Beautiful weeds

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Click click. Click click clack.

I hope that the compelling weather, the repellent stacks of grading in your office, or some other happy accident led you to cross paths this week with #freepoemsfreethoughts – the generous gift (may I call it performance art?) that Tyrone Williams and Richard Polt installed outside Alter Hall.

Supplied with a bare idea, the pair and their manual typewriters riffed and pecked on request.Photo of CAS Faculty Members sitting on a table

Brilliant. I hope you, like me, came away with little slips of inspiration, rumplestilkinned from the basest of material — in my case, a thought provoked by my own rain-soaked, chemical-deprived yard (pictured above).

Best wishes for an inspired exam week.

David Mengel
Two pieces of paper in the grass. Poems are typed on the paper. Text on one sheet reads: Beautiful Weeds (title) It's only that plant (line break) we do want, what seems to spoil (line break) the scenery. But everything green (line break) is life. Text on second sheet reads: To" David / Topic: Beautiful weeds / If only everything pretty we as prolific... (line break) ... but then wouldn't we look (line break) for the ugly (line break) and rare? Richard Polt