Core Haiku

Columbia College wants to hear your memories of the Core Curriculum! But there's a catch — we want to hear it in haiku. Submit your 5-7-5 recollections below. Select submissions will be featured online and in the print version of CCT throughout the Centennial year.

Enjoy a selection of those submitted by fellow College alumni.

Here in my fifties
As I first read the core texts
I blame the Cliff notes

— Lou Orfanella CC'82

Core too much to read
Monarch Notes help you indeed
With Thucydides

— Robert Sclafani CC’75, GSAS’81

Music Hum teacher
arrives late, glasses broken.
“I was mugged!” Class starts

— Elizabeth Yuan CC’96, JRN’98

Fresh-formed like Eve, I
tasted the Knowledge Apple
But found only CORE

— Imre Horvath CC’61

At just eighteen years
Like eating your vegetables —
Core Curriculum

— Mark Steven Denardo ’75

Core Curriculum.
Protested. Got arrested.
Son reads Plato now.

— Red Delicious ’97

Gloomy freshman year
Reading books I cannot pronounce;
My mind freezes over.

— Kevin Cronin '83

In Plato’s dream cave
we see only shadows of
whom we’re yet to be.

— Rabbi James B. Rosenberg ’66

Sold Core texts bought beer.
Later bought same texts paid more.
Lesson here is what?

— Thomas Chorba ’66

Core too much to read
Monarch Notes help you indeed
With Thucydides

— Robert Sclafani ’75, GSAS’81

Analytic Freud,
Synoptically wed
to Wealth of Nations

— Paul Kantor ’59 

Hidden in a wing
of The Met, I read Ovid;
Bird-like diva trills

— Richard Stukey ’78