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Final round of the Poetry Out Loud competition went down tonight–what a wonderful, grand time. Beautiful poems read and performed beautifully. I was actually very glad to be a teacher–if I were a student I think I’d have been eaten up with nerves and really wanted more than anything else to win, whereas as a teacher I got to enjoy and applaud everyone’s poems without thinking, “Is she going to sabotage my chances?” Some really beautiful and unusual poems chosen too–a nice mix of the ones that were new and the ones discovered anew.

One girl read Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.”

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no; it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Awesome.

Oh, also–on a more personal note, I got an interview at Cornell for their Near Eastern Studies program! Woohoo! That is, naturally, the one school that Blondie did not get into for chemistry…but it’s still good to be that much closer to an acceptance.

From Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can...to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.