By informal tradition, the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) has had a poet laureate, who reads a topical or amusing work at one or more of the seasonal association gatherings in Cambridge. The current laureate, Robert R. Bowie Jr. '73, revealed in his Harvard Magazine profile, at the outset of his HAA presidency, that his tutor has been Lowell professor of the humanities William Alfred, a playwright and poet who "influenced my love of poetry and literature." A lawyer, Bowie has written plays and kept at his poetry. "Without the arts," he said, "we are a rudderless boat."
During the spring meeting of the HAA this past weekend—on the first truly glorious spring day, and during the Arts First festival—Bowie rose to declaim as follows, proving that in his case, the boat has a rudder, steered by a sense of humor. As he noted in his preface, the work purports to be a missive from an alumni admissions interviewer to the dean of admissions and financial aid for Harvard College:
Instead of my customary poem as your Poet Laureate, I thought I should read you an e-mail I received from an extremely distraught member of the Schools and Scholarships Committee which was sent after he heard that several admitted students were rumored to have chosen Stanford because the weather this winter was better in Palo Alto. I recognized the extent of his emotional distress when I realized that his e-mail was written in six-line stanzas with a rhyme scheme of ABACCB.
To: William Fitzsimmons, Dean of Harvard College Admissions
Cc: Robert Bowie, Jr., former chair of Schools and Scholarships Committee
From: Snowboundalumnus@post.harvard.edu
Re: Our Recent Winter
Dear Fitz, Why should this winter trouble us?
To Hell with them. Really, just let them go.
How “New Age” to be “temperature obsessed.”
Who would choose Stanford because of its weather?
We disagree, don’t we? It brought us together—
Wasn’t Cambridge blessed by its nine feet of snow?
Behold how our Puritan God offers us bliss:
The parking meters are shut down and frozen.
Do we all see the perfect justice in this?
Do we bear witness to this Revelation:
No taxation with extreme precipitation?
A great education requires four seasons!
Washington broke up snowball fights between his guards.
Hey, we love our bad weather, seriously!
What if we’d marched in Palo Alto not the Yard:
“Pack your sunblock and flip-flops, if you care,
Tomorrow night we’ll be crossing the Delaware
And don’t you forget your surfboard and Frisbee!”
All kidding aside, it’s a question of judgment.
Fitz, I’m serious, let’s go on the attack.
Education is its own environment.…
Hey, isn’t the snow rain and rain is water?
Why dehydrate your son or your daughter?
What parent or guardian could live with that?
It’s a desert out there! A constant drought!
Forget the soap if you’ve got a cistern.
Seriously that’s what we’re talking about.
If you want a shower you’re out of luck
Unless your kid has his own water truck
And a hydrolic recycling system.
At Harvard we learned at the edge of water.
It is part of us. It is our gestalt.
Education is our advancing order.
Isn’t by a river the perfect place to teach?
We live to learn at the edge of our beach.
We have the Charles. They’ve got the San Andreas Fault.
Our winters are not black and white you know.
It gets a little dark, all that is true
But the snow turns gold when the dogs let go.
It’s our great beer that gives us our pink cheeks,
For here in Cambridge we are all unique.
We don’t catch a “common cold” we die of flu.
Fitz, I think I may be permanently damp—
But things are real good…real good…great for me—
Since I’ve started to worship an old sun lamp.
I took some Prozac. Snorted Wellbutrin;
And am waiting for the Zoloft to kick in
And I love my Primal Scream Therapy.
After this winter, spring will catch us all off guard
And the new flowers will bloom after all.
Your admitted freshmen will flood the Yard,
Kick off their winter boots and feel the warm sweet
Grass tickling their cute little freshmen feet—
Let’s not tell them about the hurricanes next fall.
Best wishes,
Snowboundalumus@post.Harvard.edu
