National Poetry Month - Poem(s) of the Day

As National Poetry Month draws to a close, today Fordham Notes features two final poems by members of the Fordham community.

Travel Writing (by Lytton Smith)

Or I have not been here before.
This movie theatre. This movie theater.
A revolution leads to sunset, the salmon

emboss of clouds against an evening.
The glass face of a corporate structure
edged beautifully with the reflection

of corporate structures. Here you are
not lost for things to do. The walk
to the famous monument takes you

past the inaccessible street musicians.
The city on the edge of sunset yet.
The walk you musician with footstep

ventures (it was folly to go barefoot
but you did) and inner compass.
There are side alleys but it is sunset

there too. The way a place is delimited
by colours you are too. Eagerly so: scents
along the avenue, imported skylines.

The lost gather at airports, silent
as geography. Observing their waiting
we expect flight you I this theatre.

(Lytton Smith is an Instructor in the Department of English.)

A Long Night (16) (By John Reed)

A long night, my love, my sweet sick sunrise,

my drunken dawn, my pearly, priceless doom.

Who but you? Waiting in my blinking eyes,

churning in exhaustion—my reckless fume.

Dirty feet, white thighs and somebody's bride;

divorcee, chapped lips and laughter to lie for.

We had no shame but we both had our pride.

Never were you mine, never was I yours.

Never came the nevermore, the sorrow

for the lost cold war, the bickered, battered

bedroom sores, mascara charred and marrow

bored. I hate how they knew we would shatter.

And whoever invented the promise

had no love, made no concession, for us.

(John Reed is an adjunct professor in the Department of English.)

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

MEALS, by Janet Kaplan

To be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal....

– Damiel, in Wim Wender’s “Wings of Desire”

1.
Wide brushstrokes are meals, black and orange and green. They descend and encroach upon the blue limited plate.


2.
A poached egg that illuminates inward. And here on earth a light that doesn’t reach the foreground and is therefore not the cause of the colors one sees in these peaches. What is the cause? The painter’s mind, her own dual nature? Then there’s the skull.


3.
My father without his glasses? A girl reading sheet music? Some meals are like stills from a home movie, half moving, half still. Some are as lurid as newsreels. So many different kinds of meals.


4.
Two bowls of spaghetti. One is sharp but uneaten. The other is vanishing quickly and so the mind paints over it, actively and malignantly abstracts it.


5.
The restaurant makes me ache for the wilderness because it is too exacting. Isn’t that sandwich too particular? That cutlet too resolute?


6.
Yolks have cholesterol. Knowledge is elsewhere. What I’m telling you to do is make money, marry young, eat healthy meals. What I’m telling you to do has no depth; I don’t believe in these things. Where was I during the party? The back room full of violins splitting at their seams. Where were you when you should have been at work? The laundromat, watching Elsie’s potted plants shake on the spinning machines.


7.
How much is intentional and how much is chaos? Eggs equal gravity. Flour equals dominant subject matter. Mustard equals the disturbance, getting closer to or further from the disturbance. Wine vinegar means that the rectangle, though disappearing, is still very strong.

8.
When I paint I don’t exist. And then I eat.


9.
The lines use red — a streak of sun or ketchup. I think “ordinary” people already understand this. A child: “how’d she make that scribble?”


10.
Wind pushes the fork, rain sweeps away the knife. As in the development of any meal, we’re going to have to experiment. This is not the same as starvation. The children eat locusts in locust season. The parents know how much time between the bloating of the feet and death.


11.
Otherwise, one can like rain, not too little, not too much. One can admire the particular green of new corn. One can send seed packets and water tanks. One can ask, all one wants, Would I share my last kernel with my neighbor?


12.
One can like form or one can like chaos. A man was chosen to race against his own meal: “Go, man, go!”


13.
It is terrible to enter the mind of the hungry man. And so he recedes and the meal gains the foreground. Convenient and appealing — solid, for something so small.


14.
The placement of the condiment is often a paradox.


(Janet Kaplan is Fordham's poet-in-residence and winner of the 2011 Sandeen Prize for Poetry. This is excerpted from her book Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011))

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

Saint Melville (by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell)

“Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable;
deep memories yield no epitaphs.” Moby-Dick

Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx

Is this what you were called to, still pilgrim,
to sleep beneath six small feet of earth?

A scroll unrolled across your headstone
unengraved: the whiteness of the whale?

Is this the dumb blankness full of meaning
Ishmael fought and found at the end?

Or is it pure chance, Queequeg’s oaken sword
struck blunt across the warped Loom of Time?

A paradox and pleasure to find you
grounded, for now, on the leeward shore,

your own bones unmarked by any writing,
not one hieroglyph of what you’d hoped to be,

no tattoo grafted from the savage thigh,
no etching from the dead leg of Ahab.

That you should leave us silent at the last
like the mad captain taken by the sea

echoes and keeps your bitter promise,
life but a draught, unfinished and undone.

I place on your stone among the offerings—
rocks and blossoms, mute things of this earth—

a shell cleft clean by the constant tide,
the song without words she sings and sings.


(from Moving House, Word Press, 2009)

(Angela Alaimo O'Donnell is Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.)

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

See That Bird (By Joanna Cooper)

Believe me or don’t, I’ve been a hoarder of private glees. Have forgotten

my givens, the muck of my beginnings. Thought on those other

beginnings. How string-haired teenagers stood around my crib

harmonizing Neil Young. I’m not even kidding. There is that

in my species—an algebra of voice and floating particles. Sly jokes.

Feet out the car window. Minor key susurrations.

What if you saw me standing in the kitchen staring at an avocado pit

in wonder and plain looking? How my sprouted bread and vegetables

felt so blessed I wanted to kiss them before I took them into me

and chewed. Well, ok. We have our ecstatic songsters.

We have our quiet wonderers. But see that bird out your window,

how small and impertinent and there for a season, screaming

its little head off out its beak? That’s kind of me.

(Joanna Cooper is a post-doctoral teaching fellow in the Department of English.)

Joe Grano to Discuss Business Leadership at Fordham

Joe Grano, chairman and CEO of Centurion Holdings LLC, will discuss the need for sound business leadership and the lessons he learned while directing several top financial firms.

He is the author of You Can’t Predict a Hero: From War to Wall Street, Leading in Times of Crisis (Jossey-Bass, 2009).

· April 27, 2011

· 5:30 p.m.

· Keating Third

· Rose Hill campus

Previously, Grano was the chairman and CEO of UBS Financial Services, Inc., and was instrumental in helping to bring about the merger of PaineWebber with UBS in 2000.

He is a former chairman of the Board of Governors of the National Association of Securities Dealers.

In addition to his experience in the business world, he was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002 to serve as chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. He served in that capacity until 2005.

Grano is also a former U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets).

This event is sponsored by the Gabelli School of Business.

- Joseph McLaughlin

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

I Am a Very Fat Woman (by Rebecca Bates)

When the scale reads 107.8, she goes to the kitchen and shoves almonds in her mouth. She clamps down and many clatter across linoleum. She stomps the rogue almonds into a pulp and says, “I want to eat that.” The kitchen cabinets are packed with fruit now rotten. Her teeth pierce mealy apple flesh and mush streaks down her chin and neck, pools in her clavicle. She buries her face in bags of quinoa and inhales. Grain wedges between her molars and she rinses with sour milk. She leaves the house. She eyes a fire hydrant on the street and says, “I want to eat that.” She unhinges her jaw and it swings in front of her chest and then she squats and swallows the fire hydrant whole. A boy child watches. She approaches him and yanks him to her face by the hair and says, “I am going to eat you.” The boy squirms wildly, and cries, “No, I won’t tell. I swear, I swear.” But she unhinges her jaw once again and consumes him, slurps him down all the same.

I am Rebecca
Bates. Here to devour your
offspring. Worship me.

(Rebecca Bates is a graduate student in English with a creative writing emphasis.)

Fordham to Host Career Workshop for Catholic School Educators

Educators working at the 27 schools slated for closure by the Archdiocese of New York at the end of this school year may be wondering what their next career steps are. Fordham’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) would like to help.

Along with the Center for Catholic School Leadership and Faith-Based Education and Fordham Career Services, GSE will host a career-planning event for Catholic school educators on Saturday, April 30, in Westchester and on Wednesday, May 18, in Manhattan.

“Career Planning for Catholic School Educators” is designed to assist Catholic schoolteachers and administrators who will be affected by the closing of schools in the Archdiocese of New York. The event is the brainchild of Patricia Kelly-Stiles, Ed.D., (TMC ’70, GSAS ’75, GSE ’82, ‘99), associate director for the Center for Catholic School Leadership and Faith Based Education.

Prior to joining Fordham, Kelly-Stiles spent decades in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. As deputy superintendent responsible for teacher and principal personnel, Kelly-Stiles witnessed staff at a crossroads when the that diocese made the decision to close parish schools.

“I remembered interviewing many of these people when they were first starting out,” Stiles-Kelly said. “You felt the loss on a very personal level.”

Back in Brooklyn, Stiles-Kelly reached out to a Catholic university in the area who helped prepare the parish school staff affected by the closures for the job market.

“It worked very well,” she said. “I attended a conference at Boston College this past September that involved Catholic colleges and universities across the country, including Fordham. Father Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, and Father William F. Leahy, S.J., president of Boston College, spoke about what Catholic colleges and universities can and can’t do for K—12 Catholic schools. So I knew Fordham would be willing to step up to the plate.”

Stiles-Kelly hopes the event will attract staff from the 27 Roman Catholic schools slated for closure.

“The Graduate School of Education has a special relationship with all of the schools in the Archdiocese of New York because we offer a religious school scholarship for people working in faith-based schools,” Stiles-Kelly said.

GSE staff will help attendees gain information about strategies and techniques for job searching and resume writing.

Linda Horisk, assistant dean of admissions and enrollment management at GSE, said the workshop is going to include a discussion and strategies for transitions. That portion will be presented by Annette McLaughlin, a human resources and development professional for more than 22 years, who provides career counseling through the Office of Career Services at Fordham.

“We’re asking attendees to bring a resume,” Horisk said. “We’ll discuss current issues in education today, information about core competencies in education, job search strategies and technique with an emphasis on technology and some networking.

For more information or to RSVP, contact Linda Horisk at gse_admiss@fordham.edu.

The schedule for events is as follows:

Saturday, April 30, at 1 p.m.
Fordham University Westchester Campus
400 Westchester Avenue West Harrison, NY 10604

Wednesday, May 18, at 5:30 p.m.
12th Floor Lounge
Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus
113 West 60th Street New York, NY 10023

—Gina Vergel

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

The Face of Christ (by Daniel Berrigan, S.J.)

The tragic beauty of the face of Christ shines in our faces;

the abandoned old live on
in shabby rooms, far from comfort.
Outside,
din and purpose, the world, a fiery animal
reined in by youth. Within
a pallid tiring heart
shuffles about its dwelling.

Nothing, so little, comes of life's promise.
Of broken, despised minds
what does one make
a roadside show, a graveyard of the heart?

Christ, fowler of street and hedgerow
cripples, the distempered old
-eyes blind as woodknots,
tongues tight as immigrants'-all
taken in His gospel net,
the hue and cry of existence.

Heaven, of such imperfection
wary, ravaged, wild?

Yes. Compel them in.

(excerpted from And the Risen Bread, Selected poems 1957-1997)

(Father Berrigan is Fordham’s poet-in-residence.)

Documentary Puts Focus on 'Other Side of Immigration'

Roy Germano
Photo courtesy of www.theothersideofimmigration.com

Fordham students marked the last day of New York’s Immigration Heritage Week on April 15 with a screening and discussion with an award-winning filmmaker and a performance by a Queens-based Spanish-language hip-hop group.

The Other Side of Immigration (Roy Germano Films, 2009), an award-winning documentary about Mexico's most crippling economic hardships, was shown on the Rose Hill campus.

Through more than 700 interviews with the families left behind by U.S.-bound migrant workers, the film highlights the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on poor farmers, the country's vicious cycle of poverty spurred by a corrupt government and the social pressures on Mexicans to seek a better way of life.

The 55-minute film was shot, edited and produced by Roy Germano, Ph.D., a visiting professor of politics at The New School, while he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

Germano said he was inspired to shoot the film while was working on a dissertation on the political impact of money Mexicans in the US send to home communities.

“I was looking at why people send money home and found a relationship between decreased spending by the Mexican government on things like subsidies and increased money that’s remitted back,” he said. “When people lose a safety net, they find another one.”

Remittances, money transferred from documented and undocumented immigrants living in the United States to their home country, accounted for 2.5 percent of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product or U.S. $26 billion in 2009. When asked if migration is a means for development in Mexico, Germano said the results are mixed.

“On one hand, you can see some people drop out of the labor force when they are receiving money from abroad. Also, lots of times communities are losing their best, hardest-working people,” he said. “But you also get an economic resource that helps people get a foot on a ladder rung. They’ll send their kids to school or be able to get healthcare. If people don’t have to worry where their next meal is coming from, then hopefully they can develop the community.”

But development is not always the first priority for remittance dollars, as Germano found that 60 percent of families who receive monies from abroad first use those funds to buy food.

“But I did find a trend of people who will pool money earned in the U.S. and send back large amounts for community development projects,” Germano said. “The Mexican government has even developed the ‘Three-for-One’ program for migrants, where for every dollar that’s sent back through one of these ‘community bundles,’ the government matches it with two extra dollars for things like building a road or a sewer system.”

Germano found remittances to Mexico function like an economic stimulus.
“It’s like shooting money into the economy to get people spending,” he said.

By the end of the film’s production process, Germano said he thought there were easy answers in dealing with the issue of immigration.

“But the more cynical I get—and not in a bad way—but maybe more realistic, is that this is going to be an issue that’s solved over the generations partly due to lack of political will,” he said. “It seems that in the U.S., there is a resistance to actually creating a good policy and it’s born from the fact that policy makers are divided over what to do.”

The Republican party is often considered to be the party of business and national security, Germano said.

“So you have a Republican that’s thinking how to vote on immigration. On the one hand, they’ll say we should let in more immigrants and legalize more of them so that businesses can get the workers that they need. But that same Republican might have constituents that are concerned about change of American culture and the landscape of America and there are people who are resistant to that,” he said. “And there’s a similar story with Democrats. They have loyalty to working class but at the same time to lower class voters, so they’ll be torn between these two constituencies.”

This is why immigration reform under President Ronald Reagan in 1986 cracked down on the border more than ever in history, yet at the same time, legalized three million people, Germano said.

“And it’s why we up with an employer sanction regime, where we say to employers, you’ll get fined $10,000 if you hire an undocumented worker, but at the same time, it’s not up to you whether the workers documents are real or not. Essentially we pass immigration policies that conflict with each other and have no teeth,” Germano said.

Queens-based group Hispanos Causando Paniko (HCP), pioneers of Spanish-language Hip Hop in New York City, closed the event with a performance. Their songs, such as Medidas Drasticas, or Drastic Measures, speak to the struggles of Hispanic immigrants in New York.

For more information about the documentary, visit www.theothersideofimmigration.com. For more information on HCP, visit http://www.hispanoscausandopaniko.com/

The event was sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Center for International Policy Studies' research unit on Migration, Gender and Development with support from the Fordham Deans’ Council.

—Gina Vergel

Hispanos Causando Paniko
Photo courtesy of www.hispanoscausandopaniko.com

Fordham University Social Media Policy

The University reserves the right to delete any posting or comment it finds offensive from University blogs, Facebook pages, or other social media platforms.

As a rule, we delete advertisements for non-Fordham events, products, businesses and fundraisers. We do not delete critical posts unless they contain personal attacks or profanity. We welcome debate, but strongly encourage visitors on Fordham sites to practice civil discourse.

Any questions regarding this policy or Fordham's social media may be addressed to:

Bob Howe
(212) 636-6538
howe@fordham.edu

Thank you, in advance, for helping us maintain an open and collegial atmosphere on Fordham websites.

—Bob Howe

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

Grandmother’s Lipstick (By Rachel Kaminsky)

She boils an egg (watching).

Light illuminates the stove her black bob (patent leather)

sets a blaze the gold chai ‘round her neck (a camel).

Brighton Beach: breeze bikini bazaar.

Beauties bronze their skin under a blistering bulb.

From the 18th-storey
of a Warbasse building

children are pinky-toenail-size it is good to be a child

the clink of kitten heels against the tile a hard boiled egg served to you
(in silver)

between pillars of salt and pepper.

Once, my father wanted to play detective.

He wrote a message with his mother’s lipstick on her vanity mirror
(I have kidnapped your dog).

She banged his head against the wall

split open (a pea pod) his brow

blood ran

onto the lapel of his trench coat.

That was the Lower East Side years after

black smoke of a corpse hurried across the sky

unwashed skin of a stranger sleeping beside her

the starved dead stacked like fish
in a wheelbarrow.

Then the British Red Cross their box of lipstick,
piece of humanity in a plastic tube.

In Coney Island my grandmother balances an egg on a platter
walking across a kitchen
with a view of the Wonder Wheel.

(Rachel Kaminsky is a Master's student in the Department of English with a creative writing concentration.)

CEO Magazine Gives Business Graduate Programs High Marks

Three times, CEO Magazine has ranked MBA and EMBA programs around the world, and just as it did last year, the editors there put Fordham’s programs in the highest echelon.

In its annual ranking of MBA programs, the magazine, which is published in London by the Callender Media Group, ranked the Graduate School of Business Administration in its tier one category for both its MBA and EMBA.

The big change from last year was that Fordham’s Executive MBA program was included in Tier I in the global category, something that Francis Petit, Ed.D. Associate Dean for Executive MBA Programs said reflected especially well on the school.

The MBA program, which had been unranked previously, was included in the North American regional category, putting it in the company of universities such as Columbia, Duke, Harvard and Stanford.

“This is, of course, positive news for our program and it continues the momentum we are building,” he said. “What is nice to see is that last year Fordhams’ EMBA program was ranked tier one within the North America region, and now we have made it to tier one within the global rankings.”

Both Petit and David Gautschi, Ph.D., Dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration, were interviewed in a Q&A article for the magazine, “Take a Swing at This: The World’s Jazziest Institution, The Fordham MBA.”

In it, Dean Gautschi emphasized four themes the college has embraced as part of its commitment to its Jesuit heritage:

—Advancing understanding of business in the global economy.

—Advancing the understanding of business in a money center such as New York City.

—Advancing understanding of business in a media center; an element with a technological spin.

—An explicit drive to increase the societal understanding of business.

“These elements align together and all are anchored on the fourth and follow certain practice guidelines that in so doing reveal our Jesuit stripes,” Dean Gautschi said.

He also touted the creation of the Fordham Consortium, a gathering of 45 people from different walks of life, who come together to form discernment and to discuss ‘what is the purpose of business’, regardless of one’s global position.

“This organization is neatly reflected in the vision and construction of the MBA program where we are keen to bring different ideas and people together, not to drive unilateral thought but, to cover a range of different contexts. We need to understand these differences and celebrate them,” he said.

Fordham’s EMBA program is designed for business professionals and managers on the fast track toward challenging managerial and global assignments. The program focuses on building each student’s personal portfolio in management development with tools that can be implemented immediately in the workplace.

—Patrick Verel

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

(Christopher GoGwilt is a professor of English.)

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

Circumnavigating the Lake (By Cecily Parks)

Whiz-bang,
in a car again
downing sodas
& keeling to mime
the shoreline spree:
giddied waves
of roadside soft-
serve simulacra,
grease cresting
over fast
food shacks,
a flimsy dock’s
bob-&-weave
above the blue-
green blue. The
blownback rushes
counterfeit our
faithless hair &
our doubletaking
at the drive-in
marquee as we
lap our odyssey
& sister
the lacustrine.

(Cecily Parks is an adjunct professor of creative writing in the Department of English)

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

Scene: a Loom (By Sarah Gambito)

Scene: a Loom


If I emulate you, where would my rafters be?
She pulls out her voice scale by scale.
She thinks I do not hear her emotion.
This is a shock.

To make it more specific— my people.

Children are the imminent sojourn.
A maybe of love.
Brilliant persuasion from the stands.

I buy you a plate of expensive pears.
I cut the pear in ½.

January 8th We eat a ½.
January 8th Someone dear to me has died. Someone dear to me has died.
January 28th Ito ay isang pagdasal para sa kapatid ko meaning

He was unkind and she loved him.
He left her on the impended highway and she loved him.
He went away to the far country and she loved him.

I do not know the Lord.
But he spoke in a lovely way.
Created. Silvery citadel.

(Sarah Gambito is an assistant professor of English and director of Fordham's Creative Writing Program.)

Concerts and Lectures Fete Distinctive Churches

Fordham hosted a pair of spring concerts on April 9 and 10 that focused on the art and architecture of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle and the Fordham University Church.


The Fordham University Women’s Choir conducted by Stephen Fox and the Fordham University Choir conducted by Robert Minotti performed Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Mark Jennings’ O Crux and Gabriel Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine and Requiem. The Bronx Arts Ensemble provided the music.

Gregory Waldrop, S.J., assistant professor of art history, discussed the mural The Crucifixion on April 9 at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle. The mural, which was painted by William Laurel Harris from 1906 to 1908, hangs above the door of the church.


The story depicted in the artwork is very familiar and has a “classic cast,” as Father Waldrop called it, featuring Jesus surrounded by golden ether, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and St. John.


The crucifix in the mural is in axis with the cross over the altar at the front of the church.

“The conjunction of images of Christ’s saving body defines a space, and gathers up in that space all those present in the church—the flock, who gather to praise God on the cross, who gather to hear the word proclaimed from the pulpit, who gather to receive Eucharist at the altar,” Father Waldrop said.



Father Waldrop discussed details that only can be seen by looking closely at the mural from the balcony. He described the gold shimmer that coats the pink sky and purple city in the artwork. He said that the city scene and sunset are based on the actual Jerusalem, at least in mood and lighting, and show a definite moment in time.

The city painted in the mural above the entrance of church is contrasted with New York, the “very real, very alive, very specific city where hope is made concrete in our living out the love that God has shown us,” he said.



Monsignor Joseph G. Quinn, vice president for University mission and ministry, spoke on April 10 about the Stations of the Cross at the Fordham University Church.

Photos by Michael Dames.

-Jenny Hirsch

Queens Court and McMahon Hall Triumph in RecycleMania

In the end, it was a queen’s world.

Queens Court, the three-building complex comprised of St. John's, St. Robert's and Bishop's Halls on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, beat ten other residence halls at Rose Hill and Lincoln Center in the University’s first RecycleMania contest.

The ten-week long national competition wrapped up last week, and when the final numbers were tabulated, Queens Court had recycled both the most paper and cardboard at 35.93 pounds per person, and the most glass, metal and plastic, at 42.22 pounds per person.

McMahon Hall, the lone residence hall at Lincoln Center campus, took home first prize for an achievement of the opposite sort: Residents there generated the least amount of trash generated over all, at 84.15 pounds per person.

This is the first year Fordham participated in the contest, in the informal “Benchmark” division. Rounding out the rest of the results were:

Paper/cardboard:
1. Queens Court: 35.93 pounds per person, or 4,850 pounds total
2. Campbell Hall: 27.51 pounds per person, or 7,570 pounds total
2. Walsh Hall: 26.32 pounds per person, or 10,950 pounds total

Glass/metal/plastic
1. Queens Court: 42.22 pounds per person, or 5,699 pounds total
2. Salice-Conley Hall: 39.13 pounds per person, or 8,765 pounds total
3. Campbell Hall: 38.91 pounds per person, or 8,133 pounds total

Trash
1. McMahon Hall: 84.15 pounds per person, or 74,137 pounds total
2. Loschert Hall: 115.28 pounds per person, or 29,512 pounds total
3. Alumni South: 122.93 pounds per person, or 37,125 pounds total

While the rest of the residence halls were not far behind the leaders, there were some exceptions. Martyr’s Court, for instance, recycled 17.23 pounds of paper and cardboard per person and 22.90 pounds of glass, metal and plastic per person. Those weren’t the lowest numbers for either category—those honors belong to McMahon Hall and Tierney Hall, respectively—but they do help explain another number: 482.11, the number of pounds of trash generated per person there.

Robert Freda, director of the Custodial Services department, said two issues were at play at Martyr’s Court that they would work with the Department of Residential Life to address. Although magnetic signs distributed by RecycleMania were posted around the building, he said student awareness could be improved.

They also need to re-examine the locations of the collection bins in Martyr’s Court. Because some of the closets where trash is collected are not big enough to also accommodate recycling bins, Freda noted that some of the bins had to be placed in lounges instead. That absence of consistency, and not residents’ apathy, was probably the cause of the spike in trash.

“The containers are there for recycling, but we want to make it as easy as we can for students to know where they are,” he said.

All told, the average diversion rate over the past ten weeks for the residence halls was about 22 percent, according to Great Forest, a consulting firm that crunched the numbers for Fordham. So the competition provided a good look at the ratio of trash to recyclables generated overall from the residence halls.

—Patrick Verel

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

Hello, Sweetheart (by Elisabeth Frost)

Hello, Sweetheart

Mother’s voice on the phone. She uses her favorite endearment.

I ask how she is. “Oh, fine,” she says. “I’m not disturbing you?” And she talks about the constant rain. I half-listen, writing the day’s errands on an envelope, my shoulder clamping the receiver, till I notice an inflection to her speech.

“Excuse me,” I say, interrupting her. “But who are you looking for?”

Seconds pass. Her voice is thin. “Why, I’m looking for you! I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

“But,” I insist, “who am I?”

She starts screaming. “Margaret! You’re Margaret!”

From All of Us (White Pine Press, 2011)

(Elisabeth Frost is an associate professor of English and Women's Studies and Editor, Poets Out Loud Prize book series.)

Fordham Marketing Association Wins First Prize!

Seven members of the Fordham Marketing Association (FMA) brought back the first prize plaque for “Best Use of the Conference Theme” in their exhibition booth at the American Marketing Association 33rd International Collegiate Conference in New Orleans last month. The FMA members joined 1,300 other students from 140 universities and colleges for a weekend of education, career development, networking and fun.

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

Tu (by Melissa Castillo-Garsow)

(Sept. 27, 2010: Dedicado a mi prima Edna, 19, who I never met, porque fue asesinado el 19 de Julio de 2010 en Ciudad Juarez, México.)

Tu

Tu eres diferente
From me.
You had to:
cross the border everyday
take out your passport and
sit in traffic, staring.
the barbed wire
to remind you of tu Mexicanidad.

I

Thousands of miles away
I never knew your border
Mine was different:
piñatas and enchiladas
Mariachis and flan
La virgen above my bed
bright pink cheeks when my friends said
“I can’t understand your dad.”

We

We used to wear matching bracelets
“best friends forever.”
We promised we would never become
“just primos” –
separados por un pais that makes
“nosotras” sound wrong.


Vosotros

is a word we never use;
don't know how to use.
You lived in Tijuana
I lived in translation.
Vosotros is a word we don’t want to use.


She

She has a border too –
In a state where I tell her to carry ID everwhere she goes.
Colombian-Mexican-American
Revise: Mexican Colombian-American.
Chimichangas, cactus, cumbia.
Half sister. Three passports.
answering only en Inglés.
They

can’t tell the difference.

(Melissa Castillo-Garsow is a Master's candidate in English with a creative writing concentration.)

National Poetry Month - Fordham Poem of the Day

Se costeggio il bosco / If I Linger Near The Woods (by Alessandro Polcri)

Se costeggio il bosco
ti sento narrare le tue storie
attraverso le mille bocche delle rane e dei gufi
il trascolorare del rumore dei rami
rotti dalle zampe dei cinghiali
e i tonfi secchi delle ghiande
mentre il vento spande l’eco del tuo canto
unito e coerente amalgama
di incoerenti note.
Da qui, dall’orlo dove mi trovo,
non mi è possibile separare
le diverse voci che compongono la tua.
Il continuum è il solo dato di fatto del tuo esistere,
del mio solo un ascolto occasionale.

***

If I linger near the woods

I hear you tell your stories

through the thousands of mouths of frogs and owls

the discoloration of the noises of branches

broken by wild boars’ hooves

and the dry thud of acorns

while the wind disperses the echo of your song

unified and cohesive amalgam

of incoherent notes.

From here, from the border where I find myself,

it is not possible for me to separate

the different voices that make up yours.

The continuum is the only certainty of your existence,

of mine, only an occasional listening.

(translated by Amelia Moser)


(Alessandro Polcri, Ph.D is an assistant professor of Italian and associate editor of Condirettore, Italian Poetry Review (IPR) )

National Poetry Month: Fordham Poem of the Day

The Fury Fused (by Cristina J. Baptista)

“Only in darkness is thy shadow clear”
Hart Crane, The Bridge

Your clarity was a strict green thing,

born of gaslight and doubt:

your face, perturbed surface

of an abandoned beach.

I may be daughter of Janus and a Blue Moon,
but you have more faces than a deck of cards.


At the museum, two women
and one man were laughing at the statue—
“Look! He has a broken pen___”

Why don’t you write to me?

The absence of the formal feeling

is the nucleus, unspun

and sent into another orbit

wholly tangential to its origin.

A brooding look:
something smoldering beneath
eyebrow kindling
before reaching the bedrock of eyes.

“What talks back cannot
be the flower.”
A Zen expression.
What does that mean?
Has anyone stopped to consider
a flower may speak
in ways that do not require words?


In my hands, a rock is no colder
than when it is in yours.

(Cristina J. Baptista is a Ph.D. candidate and Teaching Associate in the GSAS Department of English.)

National Poetry Month: Fordham Poem of the Day

I Would Have Told Calypso Something Like (by Sarah Grimm)

long oars are plunged into mud and barnacles scale them. Those things like fossils are living, and so am I. My stasis, too, is as hard as bone and curl footed. At night, I dream of long oars separating the seas.

I would have found her in the grotto and said,

cleave to the long-oared ships, for they are anchored and crusted over. Their embrace, though wooden, is wider than my own.

The olive tree is a hard kind of home and some days I wake with oil in my ears. For hours, sounds come to me as if from underwater and I am dizzy with hunger for a place far from here.

(Sarah Grimm is Masters candidate in English with a concentration in creative writing.)

National Poetry Month: Fordham Poem of the Day

Haiku Geese (by Heather Dubrow)

In autumn the wings
of inkblack geese punctuate
the lucid blue page.

(Heather Dubrow is Fordham's John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic Imagination.)

National Poetry Month: Fordham Poem of the Day

(See Sketch Book) by Kevin Dwyer

My father could speak Cornish.
The grain on him as candle smoke,
knuckles covered with ash,
cooped in ‘til morning brim,
with a shock of wet heads.

A gale in the tuft unraveling in a cowl
like the corner of a handkerchief.
Red candle wax crisp and meshed over
with a lacework of needles like ice-pillars.

Are we his glass to look in?
The illusion looking across the wagon,
unable to lift our heads.

You may sometimes look down
but they do not know it:
my finger is selfmurder.

S inscape mixed of tree backwards,
drawing itself from the line of the keel.
What must it be to be someone else?

A field of hay is too warm.
The taste of clover or alum?
The sun is about that.

Though as far from one another
as we are from some of them,
there is wanting freedom here
and multiple coins to choose from.

Broken blots of snow in the dead.
A slow entasis strips porcelain maroon.
Rollers across the wind,
blown from the next snow,
each striking a greater saint,
charged like ropes and hills.
This is the real meaning of an artificial pot.

(Kevin Dwyer is a Masters student in English with a creative writing concentration.)

National Poetry Month: Fordham Poem of the Day

Scene on a Ledge (for Vaudeville) (by Amanda M. Calderon)

I guess this means the enormous, bloody tooth that pried itself—no, just dislodged—
from my mouth last night
was for you
and that Death with a black bowler—and, because it’s
comical,
a monocle—
will flutter in
dandily

and recite a monologue about how you are what you are,
what you possess, what rings around your head in the middle of the circle, among the things you are meant to act with; how you won’t know what to do with them; how you’ll put on the hat and say you are an honest honest man, except not enough and not quite right and Death will want to know if you realize that he and the acting professor are the same which is to say that you will die when you don’t know what to do with a pile of junk on a floor and I hope you don’t go flinging yourself out of that window because of it or me

I don’t want to die on a chaise lounge, falling asleep by the sea

(Amanda M. Calderon is a second-year Master's student in English with a creative writing concentration.)

Join Fordham's Own Poets for National Poetry Month

Canadian Poet Mark Strand describes the experience of reading a poem most delectably:

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”

In celebration of April as National Poetry Month, the Office of Communications has collaborated with Poets Out Loud to publish a cross-section of poetry written by Fordham University faculty, administrators and graduate students.

Starting Monday, April 4, we will be posting one poem per day right here on our blog, linked to the daily SPOTLIGHT calendar and cross-posted to our Facebook account.

Poetry lovers, prepare to dig in.

Fordham Explores Moral Issues Surrounding 9/11 Responses

As the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks nears, the debate over methods of preventing future harms while preserving moral integrity has raised complex questions that touch upon issues of rights, redress and common humanity.

Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education and Center on Religion and Culture are co- hosting a conference featuring discussions by a distinguished multidisciplinary group of policy makers, theologians, legal scholars, journalists, moral philosophers and social scientists.

Moral Outrage and Moral Repair: Reflections on 9/11 and Its Afterlife, which seeks to advance public dialogue and moral understandings as the country continues to grapple with these tensions, will take place on Tuesday, April 12, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

Panel topics include:

• Religion and Terrorism: Context and Perspective: Foundational themes that will inform historical, psychological, and religious understandings of terrorism and wrongdoing.

• Forgiveness & Moral Repair: Religion & Philosophy: An examination of the themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, justice, and hope in response and reaction to acts of evil and terrorism.

• Responses to Terrorism: Law, Politics, and the Media: Discussion of legal, political, and media responses to terrorism and methods of preventing future harms.

• Continuing the Conversation: Our Post-9/11 Future: A panel including all the speakers, in a format that will allow speakers to challenge, respond to, and debate one another, and include audience questions and comments.

This event is free and open to the public but prior registration is recommended.

Register online at www.fordham.edu/moraloutrage, e-mail ethics@fordham.edu or call (718) 817-0926.

--Gina Vergel