Notes
On a tepid and earnest May afternoon, the Advocate boldly went where no Advocate member has gone before: the Harvard stadium. Equipped with one student-athlete, one former varsity baseball player, and many people kicked off of their youth little league team, we embarked on the ultimate battle (that no one asked for): to beat the Hasty Pudding in Softball. We were the best dressed, drunkest, and least appropriate team the stadium has ever seen.
Notes
February 14, 2024
e.e. cummings - “[i like my body when it is with your]”
Cummings may not traditionally be considered a love poet, but as a proud owner of the George James Firmage edited Erotic Poems, I think of Cummings as a poet of sensuality, love, and (lowercase r) romance. “[i like my body when it is with your]” is perhaps his best romantic work. A compressed yet evocative account of intimacy between the speaker and their lover, it begins with a description of bodies being with one another, and comes to a fever pitch when the words describing the bodies blend together, phrases forgoing standard spacing to combine just as the lovers’ bodies do: “i like,slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz.” This combination of classic Cummings formal experimentalism and intense sensuality sells me every time I return to it. —Colby Meeks
Notes
February 14, 2025
Caroline Harper New - “Notes on Devotion”
Full disclosure, I read this for the first time yesterday, but then I read it again and again. I’m a sucker for birds in a poem and I think they’re approached perfectly here—beautifully, carefully, not treading too heavily but aimed straight for the heart. —Leila Jackson
Spring 2018
Spring at the Advocate is a time for leaving.
School wanes, days get hotter. People trickle
out of Cambridge in ones and twos and then all
at once. Cardboard boxes pile up on the sides
of streets, lled with the expendable matter of
college life: textbooks and miniature trash bins,
cheap desk lamps and plastic shelves. Students
haul them into basements, stack them up in
identical rows, and let them sit for a while, as
they coat with dust and suffuse with the smell
of peat. Then, at a certain point in May, casual
goodbyes gain weight. As our friends say good-
bye for the last time in a while, “see you soon,”
we respond, not knowing if we will.
We’ve always found it uncanny and sad
that a mass of people can disperse so seamlessly,
like fog in sunlight. Your social life warps and
shrinks as the people you run into every day
become elsewhere. But the Spring issue comes
to you from this nonspace; our writers and art-
ists bring you with them as they go home, here,
and away. Fittingly, these pages present visions
of worlds in constant transit: mighty kingdoms
dissipate into playgrounds, geological history is
reverse-engineered, empress dowagers are wiped
from the record-books, and the distant past grows
tentacles to come knocking on our collective
front doors.
Open it up and let it take you there.
2025