In the formal Alpha Iota Chapter business that preceded the poems and oration, president Ann Pearson, Ross professor of environmental sciences, oversaw the ceremonies. (Full text, audio, and video of the poems and the oration accompany this report.) Lodge, she recounted, spent his life studying the ether of space, which he considered not only a scientific entity but also a spiritual one. Revell read six poems from his 2005 collection, Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected Poems, including the prize-winning work “My Mojave.” Barrett drew from the life of Oliver Lodge, a nineteenth-century British physicist-whom the novelist turned into a character in her 2013 short story “The Ether of Space”-to engage her audience in a reflection upon the interconnectedness of different fields of knowledge. Boston-born novelist Barrett, whose collection of short stories Ship Fever won the National Book Award in 1996, decided to become a writer in her thirties in order to make sense of the world (For detailed background on each, see Harvard Magazine’s “ A Mystical Poet and An American Novelist.”) Best known for his 1983 collection From Abandoned Cities, Revell draws inspiration from Henry David Thoreau and William Carlos Williams for his mystical poems. Speaking in Sanders Theatre on Tuesday morning, poet Donald Revell and orator Andrea Barrett opened the Commencement celebrations at the 224th Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) exercises.
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