Cornellians Celebrate National Poetry Month With Campus Events

By ALLYSON KATZ Sun Contributor

Inspired by the success of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, National Poetry Month was founded in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets in order to increase teaching, readership and engagement — 27 years later, Cornell students and faculty are finding their own ways to celebrate.

The Department of Literatures in English hosted its semesterly Zalaznick Reading series this spring, inviting poets such as Ross Gay and Victoria Chang to campus. The Romance Studies department hosted a similar event — Sweet Poetry, a poetry reading dedicated to student poems written in other languages.

Student clubs and organizations also engaged in poetry programming, with writing sessions at Marginalia, an undergraduate poetry organization, and Mango Poetry, as well as cultural events like Asian Diasporas Poetry Coffeehouse.

Mango Poetry is a South Asian poetry collective for undergraduate students across the diaspora, founded by Kareena Dash ’23.

In establishing this organization, Dash hoped to bridge gaps between Asian American Pacific Islander diaspora students who often feel disconnected from their own cultures and who also may not be fluent in their family’s traditional languages.

“I founded Mango Poetry as a space for AAPI students to work on writing and also to promote the involvement of Asian diaspora students in writing and the arts, because that’s not something [that’s] very visible for us,” Dash said.

On April 16, Mango Poetry and the MulMul collective — a multilingual literary collective founded to center the voices of non-Anglophone students who speak Urdu and other native tongues — host- ed Mushaira, a poetry social.

Mushaira is the traditional Urdu poetic symposium in which poets gather to recite works they wrote, historically in Urdu, and socialize. It has been practiced amongst Urdu speakers across South Asia and for hundreds of years.

At the event, Dash explained how her organization aims to create space and bridge gaps for South Asians at Cornell.

“Sometimes I feel so out of place, and I wish to express myself... and be immersed in arts and culture but I don’t know how,” Dash said. “The spaces that exist in the South Asian countries where we would have gotten that stratification, they don’t exist here, and so we are the ones responsible for starting those.”

Dash added that poetry can be a powerful tool for bridging cultural gaps and expressing one’s emotions.

“[Poetry] is a form of expression, personal expression, and it’s also an art,” Dash said. “And there [are] different levels of balance between the two and between the subjectivity of expression. … That’s why [poetry is] so powerful — it can express ideas that simple, straightforward language or prose cannot.”

Shehryar Qazi ’24, an international student from Pakistan and member of Mulmul Collective explained his struggle with finding literary spaces where he felt seen. Qazi recounted an experience speaking at a Pakistani night earlier this year that drove him to help run the collective alongside founder Pareesay Afzal ’24.

“Last semester there was huge, huge, flooding and absolute rampage, particularly [in the] Southern Provinces [of Pakistan],” Qazi said. “Some of the Pakistani grad students held an open mic night at Green Dragon… [which I think is], mostly, a very white space. The brown people there had to assimilate or be legible through some type of white [relatability].” ak2264@cornell.edu.

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“Cornell is aligned with peer universities and employers in lifting this requirement,” the email said. “Analysis by the Cornell COVID-19 modeling team found that mandating vaccination for the fall 2023 semester would not result in a substantial reduction in the spread of infection.”

The email cited high existing vaccination rates on campus, recovery from previous infection and rapidly evolving variants as further justification for eliminating the vaccination requirement. Recently, Columbia University, Princeton University and Dartmouth College announced they were waiving their COVID-19 vaccination requirements.

The announcement comes after a series of efforts from the University to ease COVID19 restrictions as cases have decreased. The safety protocols were relaxed already for the 2022-2023 academic year, eliminating some PCR test locations on campus and the masking requirement for students.

Data from the CDC indicate that Tompkins County is a low risk area for COVID-19 infections, with 16 cases reported the week of April 26. The CDC still recommends vaccinations to prevent future infections.

Antigen tests and masks will still be available for students, faculty and staff. The University still encourages vaccination and personal action to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on campus.

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