A poetry picnic was held by the reading and writing center on April 27 to allow students and faculty to share poetry with an audience.

Attendees met on the grass field behind the Learning Resource Center to share an original poem or a favorite poem.

The majority of the poems that were shared were people’s favorites, done in honor of ending National Poetry Month. The event had food, drinks and a raffle that all attendees had the opportunity to enter to win tickets to a Sacramento Republic FC soccer game.

English Professor David Weinshilboum said, “many individuals find poetry ‘inaccessible’ or ‘stupid’ but finding the right poetry is important. He said he finds new poets that he finds interesting everyday.”

Weinshilboum said poetry is all we need in life and everybody just uses it differently but whether we find the right kind is what matters the most.

Throughout the month, there have been other events to highlight national poetry month, but this event was to close it out. The instructional assistant for the reading and writing center Stuart Canton has brought more events to help bring attention to it.

“Poetry is in some ways like music or visual art in that it’s not necessarily about the thing you’re saying, like communication purely for information. It can be about how it was said and how it felt,” Cantone said.

Poems can have multiple meanings and touch people’s emotions in lots of different ways, there’s never one concrete meaning for any one poem, Cantone said.

The event highlighted how even though not one person shared the same poem, they are all there for the same reasons, to learn and be open to hearing how other people enjoy poems.

“Because it’s so free form in any way, you can use your voice and your knowledge, it’s just very interesting to see how other people would tightly condense a message or a feeling. 
And I think that’s kind of the beauty of poetry,” said 30-year-old computer science major Henry Ndao.