If you had a chance to take a study break last Sunday night and popped into the FAVA Gallery, you would have been rewarded. Poets Joseph Campana and Christopher Howell gave excellent readings, ending this semester’s Main Street Reading Series with a bang.

The night started with David Young’s thanks to senior Alex Littlefield and junior Julia Doctoroff, the student coordinators for the event. He also thanked the audience and, more specifically, the handful of people who faithfully attend the readings.

After recognizing all the people without whom the Main Street Reading Series would not exist, Joseph Campana took the stage. A native of Johnstown, N.Y., a town below the looming Adirondack Mountains, Campana is also an English professor at Kenyon College and a big Audrey Hepburn fan. He started reading from his collection titled Book of Faces.

He said that the poems he was going to read were “about icons...about how we fall in love with icons, how we have imaginary relationships [with them... It’s] also about stretching into as many different forms and shapes as possible.”

His first poem, “How to be a Star” was a list of practical advice one might give in order to reach stardom.

A funny testament to all the ridiculous things people expect from “stars,” some of the advice included steps for constructing your life story.

“Arrange poignant childhood experiences. Arrange poignant adult experiences. Arrange poignant golden years...”

Some other pragmatic tips: “Always know which side of your face to show,” and “Look good in everything. Look good in nothing.” Finally, if all else fails, one must never forget to “Ascend, ascend, ascend.”

Campana mentioned Allen Ginsberg, and it was clear that the beat poet influenced his reading style. His poem “U.S.A. 37,” inspired by a stamp featuring Hepburn, had the canonical and list style characteristic of Ginsberg and Walt Whitman.

In the poem, Campana directly addresses America as though it were a person, asking playful yet insightful questions. One of most humorous questions was, “Do people really speak other languages, or did you just make that up?”

Campana ended with a poem called “Springtime Comes to Ohio,” which was appreciated by the audience, familiar with the fickle nature of the Ohio spring.

The second reader, two-time Pushcart Prize winner Christopher Howell, started with an apology. He said that his vision was going and that he had difficulty with switching between looking at the audience and the poem, so to forgive him if he was not more engaging. Once he started reading, however, it was clear that the apology was not necessary; it turned out that his poems were not only entertaining, but resonated with ease.

Considering the depth of the poem’s content, they were remarkably easy to follow. Not only that, but I was awed by his reading voice; Howell did not adopt the overly reverent tone that readers sometimes use with poetry. He read his poems with one of the most pleasant voices I have heard at a formal reading. Rather than dramatizing his voice, his was a humble tone with total respect and understanding for the written word and how it should sound to the listener.

His reading voice was like his poems — incredibly understated, with a strong underlying sense of warmth and humor.

His first poem, “It Happens,” was a short work that selected key moments in one man’s life as he gets older. It ends with the lines, “You never were the man I thought you were. So I went to the mirror, and sure enough, I was someone else.”

The poem was poignant in its humor and was able to convey seemingly overwhelming aspects of life in just a few short lines.

Another poem began with Jesus sitting down, pondering, “Should a peaceful life really require this much kindness?”

Playing with the human aspects of Jesus, Howell has him walking around writing messages with charcoal on stones.

In one message, he writes, “Jews are my best friends...later this will be forgotten.” After wandering around for a bit, Jesus has one final revelation: “There would be no stopping me if I had a donkey.”

Most of the pieces Howell read had some kind of narrative thread. His final poem, “Dining Out,” was a particularly beautiful illustration of the experience of going to a Chinese restaurant as a child.

At the moment of leaving the restaurant and getting into the car with the family to go home, the poem ends with an understated line, seemingly simple, yet truthfully mystifying: “... hearing the sound of the car door opening before we all got in, and drove and drove though we didn’t have far to go.”

Both poets experimented with form and what poetry is capable of doing. Their results are worth anybody’s time.