By Daniel Wood

In a culture that favors reality TV and summer movies over the written word some may consider poetry to be an elitist art form, but for the several hundred people at the Boston Public Library and Northeastern who attended last weekend’s National Poetry Month Festival, poetry is more than just words — it’s a way of life.

The BPL has routinely hosted the festival in past years, but due to recent budget cuts that now force the library to close on Sundays, Northeastern hosted the second day of the festival on campus. In addition, NU students Jess Johnson and Josh Cristiano were jointly selected to represent Northeastern by opening the festival on Saturday morning with live readings of their poetry.

Johnson, a senior music technology major, took the stage first and captured the audience with an assortment of short poems that ranged from the stylishly elegant “Our Four Hands” to the lyrical realism of “March Snowstorm at Midnight.”

Cristiano, a middler English major, followed Johnson’s lead with a more introspective brand of poetry including the confrontational “The Third Door” and the distressingly dark “Insomnia.”

Cristiano applauded the event for providing a means to allow the public to experience poetry in the best way possible.