I learned a new word today: ghazal. I’m reading The Clerk’s Tale, a volume of poetry by Spencer Reese, who’s coming to campus I believe on December 4, and one of the poems is called “Ghazals for Spring.” I considered just reading it without knowledge of the word, but I eventually felt like I was missing something, so I looked it up. It sounded so foreign and I even wondered whether or not it was a real word. It is. It’s a kind of Oriental lyric, and usually erotic, poem written in recurring rhymes. That definition doesn’t seem to fit the poem, though. It doesn’t have recurring rhymes and it definitely isn’t erotic (either that or my mind is so innocent that I’m just not seeing it). So I don’t know. There are other definitions of it that say it’s a kind of song; I prefer that. It works better.

Oh, and I feel like such a bad vice-president of the poetry club. I didn’t say anything about the poetry coffeehouse in my blog, either before or after it. It was on Thursday night and I think it was a pretty big success. A lot of people showed up and there were a lot of people who read, including some performers from an album called JuSill Street Poetry. A lot of the poetry was really inspirational. One professor read a series of poems about lint; they were hilarious. She wrote about the frustrations of having lint all in your laundry and on mats despite the lint catcher in the dryer. I can completely identify with it; I hate lint. We have a yellow mat in front of our sink that always has some wierd blue lint stuck in it after we wash it. I literally sit there and pick it out; it drives me nuts. But anyway, poetry coffeehouse: for the first time, I actually stayed and put the chairs away and cleaned up. Christina had to leave early. It’s good though because I’m going to have to get into the habit of doing it anyway. Our next coffeehouse is December 6th, and I hope it’s successful, as well, despite  the fact that it’s in the middle of exam time.