Like the crocus buds awakening Mount Holyoke's campus to spring, bright leaves of verse have recently popped up all over Williston Library. In celebration of National Poetry Month and National Library Week (April 1–6), the photocopied poems by a full bouquet of bards are on display in entryways, hallways, reference areas, and reading rooms for the month of April. Much of the planted verse (now in the public domain) is there for the taking.

The green thumbs responsible for this literary arrangement belong to Raven Fonfa, reference librarian, and Margaret Lavallee, operations manager in the reference department of library, information, and technology services (LITS). Among the many poets represented are Amherst belle Emily Dickinson (MHC student, 1847–48); the late English poet Philip Larkin (a university librarian for many years); MHC's own Mary Jo Salter; Rita Dove; and other recent greats, including Randall Jarrell, Howard Nemerov, Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, and E. B. White.

In the entrance hall of Williston, patrons will find a poster produced by the Academy of American Poets, originators and sponsors of National Poetry Month, featuring United States Postal Service stamps of American luminaries Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore (an MHC Glascock poetry competition judge in 1955—the year Sylvia Plath was a co-winner), Edgar Allen Poe, and others. An array of anthologies is also on display throughout the month, showcasing such works as Joseph Brodsky: The Art of a Poem, edited by Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina (Brodsky was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Literature at MHC for fifteen years), and The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.

These "folios of April/All the library of spring," as Christopher Morley puts it in his poem "Burning Leaves, November," were culled over a period of several weeks from numerous sources. Fonfa and Lavallee are grateful for the many recommendations, including several from Mary Jo Salter, poet and Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities. In Salter's poem "Reading Room," displayed in reference, she descibe's Stimson's "pitched ceiling" which "falls/forward like a book./Even those mock-Tudor stripes/have come to seem like unread lines ..." Fonfa says they were delighted, too, to come across two Dickinson poems about libraries. "In a Library" opens, "A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is/To meet an antique book ..." Fonfa's personal favorite is a poem by Rita Dove, "Maple Valley Branch Library,” in which a teen discovers a new world of learning at her public library: "... Oh, I could walk any aisle/and smell wisdom, put a hand out to touch/the rough curve of bound leather,/the harsh parchment of dreams ..."

These "random acts of poetry," as Lavalle calls the displays, are part of what has become a campus series that recently included random acts of dance, drama, music, and art. "It was time for poetry," says Lavalle. "We have discovered so much wonderful work. It is especially appropriate to celebrate the rich traditions of libraries and poetry together. With the Glascock competition this month as well, we wanted to make a contribution." Fonfa says they would like to make the poetry exhibition an annual Williston Library tradition.

A permanent rotating display of books, letters, and photographs relating to Glascock competition judges and winners is on permanent display in the Stimson Room, along with new collections of poetry. For more information about National Poetry Month events, visit the Academy of American Poetry Web site at http://www.poets.org/npm/.