Social Change

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Our Work is Larger than We are

In No More Secondhand Art, Peter London wrote that artists were custodians of issues larger than themselves. This is also true for those of us working in diverse areas of social change: our tasks our larger than we are. Our work isn’t simply a matter of expressing ourselves properly, fixing what appears to be broken,…

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Until we’ve drawn something, we haven’t seen it.

Ten years ago I sat in on a drawing class in Oakland. The topic that day happened to be shading–how to draw the play of light and shadow around an image. After the demonstration I thanked the instructor, and was barely out the door before I burst into tears. Apparently, I had never paid much…

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Our culture neglects the “nonverbal intellect”

“The main theme to emerge…is that there appears to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates…

Visions of what it means to be human – Stanley Kunitz
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Visions of what it means to be human – Stanley Kunitz

In 2001, in celebration of National Poetry Month, Robert Siegel (on NPR’s “All Things Considered”) asked the Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz whether poetry was a dying art. “No,” replied Kunitz, “in fact people are more involved with poetry now than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.” Back in the 1970s, Kunitz wasn’t so optimistic. People…

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