Harvard and Yale: Poetry and Prose

While the Harvard and Yale Glee Clubs made music together last night, three undergraduate authors read their works at the Signet Society. Sidney Goldfarb of Harvard read poetry; Joseph Porter of Harvard read fiction; and Michael Gilfond of Yale read.

Mr. Gilfond claimed to read poetry, but effected only a portentously conceived list of disconnected adjectives, adverbs, and nouns. Rife with classical allusions as dead as his images, Mr. Gilfond's verse offered exceedingly little of interest.

After an introduction by C. Michael Hancher, Pegasus of the Harvard Advocate, Sydney Goldfarb read a collection of poems which the Advocate rejected. On first hearing, serious and complex poems can only be evaluated on the basis of their rhythm and the texture of their sound. Mr. Goldfarb's poems-no aphasic muttering, they-pulsed lively.

Joseph Porter's selections from a short novel fell between Mr. Gilfond's exclamations and Mr. Goldfarb's poems, happily on the Harvard side. Mr. Porter read a passage about marriage between the fat lady and the hunchback in a circus, and the birth of their son. In spite of over-frequent and bloated metaphors, and occasionally awkward constructions, the tale had a weird, almost compulsive attraction.

Admittedly, the reading was an unequal match: Michael Gill of Yale had his car break down on the Massachusetts turnpike. But we suspect that even equal numerical representation would not have changed the score much. In Cambridge, at least occasionally, students create literature. If they create the same in New Haven, it hasn't been exported yet.