From poetry to recent nonfiction to haiku; from medicine to music to dogs: Cornell President David Skorton and wife Robin Davisson shared selections from their favorite reads March 9 in "Books in Our Lives," the first event in a series at the Tompkins County Public Library.

The hour-long presentation began with the couple's shared love of poetry -- Skorton offering several definitions of poetry and Davisson introducing a selection with a nod to her home state.

"A major part of our story is about Iowa," she said, before reading the acceptance speech delivered in 2000 by Marvin Bell, Iowa's first poet laureate -- an honor Bell said "reconfirm[s] the idea that a person's life is worth trying to express ... All art is about what life feels like. We have no other way to fully express our feelings."

Skorton, a cardiologist and jazz musician, contributed readings on topics medical and musical and used a theme he would return to often during the hour -- writing as a common experience. "We all write in parts of our lives. We write letters, we write e-mails, we write notes to ourselves, we write notes to each other ... doctors write all the time," he said, introducing a poem by "one of my favorite physician-poets, William Carlos Williams."

He followed with volume of contemporary Russian women poets, commenting on his Russian heritage and reading English translations of "Sound Letter" by Marina Boroditskaya and "Then there was the rose I fell in love with" by Elena Ingatova.

"We write poems here in Ithaca, wonderful poems," Skorton said in introducing his next selection, Alice Fulton's "Sequel" from "Cascade Experiment."

Davisson, a professor of biomedical sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine and of cell and developmental biology at Weill Cornell Medical College, commented on "another one of our loves, dogs" and their two Newfoundlands before reading two humorous selections from the themed collection "Dog Music" -- "My Dog and I Grow Fat" by James Seay and "Newfoundland-praise" by Pamela Stewart.

Skorton also offered some choice readings on music from "But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz" by Geoff Dyer and "Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings," and then a riff-like passage from Cornell M.F.A. graduate Toni Morrison's "Jazz":

Blues man. Black and bluesman. Black therefore blue man. Everybody knows your name. Where-did-she-go-and-why-man. So-lonesome-I-could-die man. Everybody knows your name.

The readings became ever more inspirational as the hour progressed. Davisson shared two passages from "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time" by Greg Mortenson with David Oliver Rellin. She also read from Thomas McNamee's "Alice Waters & Chez Panisse," the biography of the groundbreaking chef who was instrumental in starting the "slow food" movement. Waters founded her Berkeley, Calif., restaurant in the 1970s "on the principles of locally grown and organic ingredients at the peak of their season," Davisson said.

Skorton shared several of his favorite haiku, noting that "Robin is a wonderful haiku poet." He recommended "The Japanese Haiku" by Kenneth Yasuda and read haiku by Mann Library staffer Tom Clausen '73, 17th-century haiku master Matsuo Basho and 20th-century American novelist Richard Wright ("Native Son"), who "in the last couple of years of his life became enamored of haiku and wrote 4,000 haiku."

At the end of the hour, an audience member asked Skorton, "How does poetry affect the way you deal with the world?"

His answer: "I spend a lot of time communicating, and I think about the power of words and the way you use them -- silences, speeding up and slowing down, cadences. Poetry has a lot of the same attributes."

Noting that he had written haiku for his University of Iowa inaugural speech and a prose poem for his Cornell inaugural address in 2006, he said, "I do think poetry is a verbal art form."