Our first ever event was a Summer Poetry Picnic in honour of Whitman & Keats. We bought picnic blankets, tons of fresh fruit and beverages, sweets and nibbly stuff and invited people to sit down with us, “lean and loaf at (their) ease observing a spear of summer grass” (Whitman) and to enjoy the “summer, when luxuriously / Spring’s honeyed cud of youthful thought (we love) / To ruminate, and by such dreaming high / (Are) nearest unto heaven“. (Keats)
Those who dropped by, by chance or by design, could bathe in the sun and either write whatever they pleased or participate in one of our two writing challenges. The first was a collective poem in which each person had to continue where the last person had left off, the second was a bag filled with quotes by Whitman & Keats, which could be used as prompts to get one’s own imagination going.
Leaning and loafing, indeed!
So much food – we still had so many apricots left at the end of the day (hey, Billa had a sale) that we had to give them out for free in class the next day.
Comfy blankets!
This is where we found our amazing secretary Philipp 😀
Cookies!
COOKIES!
A collection of our collective poetry and individual texts – we hung it up in the Student Lounge (R.I.P.) and they disappeared along with it.
Would you believe that two Physics students on a random walk came up with the first two lines after they’d assured us multiple times that they didn’t have a poetic bone in their body and then they just stared in disbelief after they’d said that and they were all flushed? Priceless and adorable.
The apricots were not, in fact, gone for a long time.
Shout-out to our main man Neil McCarthy who saw us, sat down, wrote a masterpiece and left again in the time it took me to pour myself a glass of water like some kind of summer heat faerie.
