blitzed.

i remember it so clearly. sitting with karen at a round table in the kletz listening to 12th street harmony and tearing up paper. we spent most of the concert and the time shortly after preparing for the night ahead. morrison spent most of the time printing in the sac office. and after we had each accumulated a reasonably sized stack, we headed out into the dark, dark night. blitz night.

we met the dps at the brewery. most of them were well on their way. a few drinks later we left the steins in the car and headed toward campus in a noticably large crowd. we used myra's (the english dept secretary) key card to get into lubbers hall. we hid them in pull down maps, between books, under tables, on professors' doors, in rolls of toilet paper... poems.

after skillfully dodging the janitoral staff (and somehow managing to quiet a very loud, very intoxicated phil waalkes) we broke in the side door of depree art building. we called our hideout friend in dewitt student center. we hung poems on the president's office door, and a poetry blitz banner across from the student union desk. we tried to get on the roof. we renamed morrison the keymaster. we split up. we regathered. we blitzed.

i'll never forget walking across the pine grove that night. clotheslines strung from tree to tree filled with poems. surely the most beautiful sight in the world. we ducked under them to reach the chapel. phil volunteered to let us in. no one thought his head first dive through the chapel bathroom window would result in a concussion (but boy did we love explaining to cap'n jack why phil was late to class the next day!) we tried to get into the bell tower. we settled for the balcony, the stage. left poems on the drumset and between piano keys. we went outside and wallpapered the anchor in poetry. we blitzed lindsay's car. we sent a group to jack's house. we went to ihop at 3am on a wednesday to celebrate our successful night.

i can't believe a whole year has gone by. the poetry blitz somehow changed my life. marked the beginning of the dps on a much larger scale. it was the true bringing together of a group of people who would later stand on tables and one another's shoulder screaming poetry over the bar crowd. a group who would spend their last weeks of college clinging to one another. a group who would stay in touch in the months and years to come as they scattered about the wide wide world. when i look back on my time at hope, the poetry blitz 2004 stands out as one of my fondest and most vivid memories. and the last month of college spent with the poets somehow defines my entire hope college experience. and so i toast to another blitz night, another april fool's day, another national poetry month. toast to my poets, wherever they may be. until we meet again... (parrot's, anyone?) ;)