Dear
Susan:
Thank you for sending the comments by students. Their feelings
are reciprocated for I was moved by their collective passion and
commitment to the art of writing. It is an art or at the very least it
can strive to be so. The complexities and the simplicities of trying to
arrange words on a page such that they can, for a brief moment, change
themselves such that they feel the world again with clear eyes and ears,
hands and feet, with a good heart, a clear voice. We have to get up
from our restless beds and, through acceptance of who and what we are,
reach past ourselves to a renewal, whether it be spiritual,
psychological, or physical. If I can transcend my childhood blindness,
my late-life, on-coming blindness, and find in all such struggles an awe
and a joy that embraces the tragedies that beset me in this life. What
we find ugly in ourselves is a gift, for surely we must know what beauty
is to recognize its opposite. If I might pass on to your students a
word or two I would ask them not to be afraid, to pay attention to the
least things of this world, a pebble, a beetle, a butterfly, a cabbage
growing fat in a garden, a child, a woman, a boy a man. Watch the world,
listen close, and report back to us in your own voice, the sound and
sense that is unlike all our voices and because it is will ring true as a
startled bell in a garden, an owl's cry so perfectly lonely in the
night.
best
patrix
We have a guest speaker tomorrow. I forgot.
It will take most of the period so I will give you Thursday to work on your poems in the lab and you can hand them in on Friday.
PLEASE MEET IN ROOM 321 TOMORROW AND NOT IN THE LAB.
THANKS.
