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