Geneseo Writing Community & the Poet-tree

Poet-tree

Anybody see the Greek Tree today? It was covered with poems! I’ll call the poem-covered Greek Tree the “Poet-tree,” also it’s a fun play on words. Anyway, the tree was “painted” with poems by a group / collective of students called Guerrilla. They aim to foster a closer and more open writing community, and to publicize student art all around campus. Their mission made me curious to ask you guys: what would you like to see happen in Geneseo’s writing community that isn’t already happening? We have a lot going on–a popular slam scene, open mics, a strong writing program, but do you think we need more avenues for publish work and getting together to talk about it?

6 Replies to “Geneseo Writing Community & the Poet-tree”

  1. I think we have a lot of really excellent opportunities for students, but I wish each of those separate venues talked more. I wasn’t able to be in Creative Writing Club this year (damn you, student teaching & a difficult work schedule), so I can’t speak to this year, but in my time there we never once collaborated with Poets’ Society. Hell, for a long time I didn’t know there WAS a Poets’ Society. We have HOUSING directed specifically towards writers. Open mics happen rather a lot, but they aren’t always well-publicized within the department unless students speak up. I think a lot of wonderful things if all of these spectacular avenues communicated more often with one another, because right now it feels like nobody talks to anybody. It’s happening a little bit: the English/CW department here is rather small, so many people have lots of fingers in a variety of pies; they just never eat slices from different ones at the same time. Individually, they’re able to do so much already, & I would love to see all of these fabulous avenues talk to one another & do more collaborative things.

  2. I think that more pop-up events could be interesting. Students could read poetry on the green. Read poetry during Mics and Mochas. Also, I think it would be cool to have a collaboration with the Geneseo Jazz Ensemble/Jazz Combo so that poets could recite their poetry with Jazz music. I think more guerrilla tactics like posting poems on the walls of lecture halls could be interesting. I also think that poetry should be posted in residence halls.

    Also, I think we should find our own tree, or even wall for students to post artwork, writing, anything. It would be really cool to have an entire wall called the “Artist’s Wall.”

    -db pena

  3. I had some friends that took a class last semester all about writing cover letters and applying to internships. I wish we had a class or group that was focused specifically on obtaining internships with literary journals and publishing our work. There are so many journals out there, even ones that center around specific topics that could be applicable to some of us, but a lot of times people just don’t know they exist. If we had a kind of publication workshop that fostered a community of writers actively trying to get their work out there, I think it could be really good for us as well as getting Geneseo’s name more widely recognized.

  4. I’d like to see an organization (hint *FUSE* hint) keep the other organizations in contact with each other. So speaking from the perspective of an officer of Poets’ Society, we definitely do collaborations, and we do them often. In the past, Nassau Hall, MiNT, Eco House, Democracy Matters, WAC, and Amnesty have reached out to us and asked us to perform at their various events or workshop with them. I’d like to see this communication happen even more. I think that maybe if we made a Facebook group for the officers of the various organizations to join, then we could spread the word of what each of us is doing or is trying to do. I don’t know if we would want to limit this to reading and writing organizations, or also include art, theater, and music, or if we should aim to make this a campus-wide kind of deal for all of the organizations.

    And just a shout out to Guerrilla: they are my heroes.

Leave a Reply to Diego Barcacel Pena Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.