With the recent addition of a Starbucks, there are now three places on campus to buy coffee, discounting the Caf, because what they serve is not coffee but rather watered down dirt with children’s’ tears mixed in. I decided to review each of these establishments and figure out which coffee joint is top bean. I, of course, will be using the standardized metric of all coffee shops: the quality of poetry written there.
I’ll start with Einstein Bros. While they’re primarily a bagel place, they take a lot of pride in their coffee. So I grabbed a cup of joe and sat down with a moleskin notebook and a seventeen dollar mechanical pencil and got to work. Within a few minutes I was able to push out a nice sonnet (Petrarchan, not Shakespearean, of course). The only criticism I have of Einstein Bro’s is that I saw someone in the booth next to mine writing a novel. How proletarian.
Next I decided to try the coffee at the library cafe. The stronger bitterness of the coffee from this establishment helped me connect with the darker side of my inner self. I wrote a mixed verse, long form piece that I titled “The Trash Earth.” I thought it was pretty good, so I showed it to my English professor, who said that it was “derivative” and that I “literally just copied ‘The Waste Land.’” Clearly he doesn’t appreciate the avant-garde.
Now for the newcomer. At Starbucks, my pencil could only form haikus, for some reason. However I was able to write 1046 of them, all while only having nine shots of espresso and three large coffees. I’m sorry, three venti coffees. There was one issue, though. While I was able to prolifically produce poems in this establishment, they all sucked. Like one of them I didn’t even follow the syllable scheme and just wrote “grass is green / so is my notebook / everything is green / I am scared.”
Each of these three coffee places has their own character, which heavily influences what types of muses tap you on the shoulder as you try to sing your sweet song. This just goes to show that what coffee shop someone is in can affect the quality of their poetry just as much as their skill with language. Oh yeah, and I guess the coffee is bearable too.