Requiescat in Pacem

William Sloane Coffin was “the conscience of the country,” says Cora Weiss, peace activist. “He questioned authority before that phrase came into vogue.” In an interview with NPR in 1994, Rev. Coffin said,

Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart is full of hope you can be persistent even if you are not optimistic. I keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing does the evidence have any chance of changing.

Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., civil activist who opposed nuclear arms, poverty, anti-Semitism and championed civil rights, died on April 12, 2006 at age 81.

Appearance as Text

What do we "read"
when we look
in the mirror?

(photo by M.A.C.)

Trivia

On Wednesday (tomorrow) at two minutes and three seconds
after 1:00 in the morning, it will be
01:02:03 04-05-06.
This will never happen again in our lifetimes!

The Bridge of Sighs

Responding to poetry

Donald Hall, in The Unsayable Said, says, "Poetry is not talk. It sounds like talk...but poetry is talk altered into art, speech slowed down and attended to, words arranged for the reader who contracts to read them for their whole heft of association and noise...Reading with care, so that a wholeness of language engages a wholeness of reading body and mind, we absorb poetry not with our eyes only nor with our ears at a reading. We read with our mouths that chew on vowel and consonant; we read with our limbed muscles that enact the dance of the poem's rhythm; we read alert to history and the context of words."

What images or lines in the poems we read in class support Hall's concept that poetry demands more of a response from us than merely mind or eyes can give?ProfC