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Vol. XIX No. 1 September 2003 |
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 Peter Rojcewicz Liberal Arts Department Chair
Fran Quinn, poet-in-residence at Butler University in Indianapolis, most influenced my intellectual and artistic development. He was my undergraduate poetry and literature professor at Assumption College. Although I had little sense of it at the time, I learned different ways of thinking and being in the world. He taught me that learning and life were not incompatible. If one learns something, one should be able to act upon it in the world. He made it clear that book learning alone is not sufficient for a good life. He created for me experiences of embodied learning to implicate the senses, emotions and intuition. When we studied the poetry of Robert Creeley, Robert Francis, Denise Levertov, and Robert Bly, we went on a road trip to visit and question them about their work. I didn’t know that I was learning how to learn; I just thought I was having great fun. Do you have a background in music, dance, or drama? Are you actively pursuing it? My father and mother, in addition to having law degrees, were interested in the arts. My father played piano, and my mother danced. They both wrote poetry. They involved me in piano and dance when I was a boy—not as a future career choice, God knows, but simply as part of a broad humanistic training. Poetry is a big part of my life. I am a practicing poet and recipient of the Worcester Poetry Prize and the Allen Ginsberg Award. What other pursuits are you passionate about? I enjoy reading and writing about anomalous folk beliefs, Eastern religion and philosophy, fairy tales and myths, alchemy, and Jungian depth psychology. I love animals (especially my dog, Bodhi), sports, and international travel. I recently returned from three glorious weeks in Italy! Who are your favorite authors and why? I return again and again to the works related to and by Plato, the Grimm brothers, Jung, Buddha, Sartre, Conrad, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, Henry Glassie, Nietzsche, the Dalai Lama, James Hillman, Thich Nhat Hanh, Aristotle, and William Stafford. If you could have your students visit any place in the world, where would it be and why? I would tell them to travel, travel, travel. There is nothing more important to human development and learning than travel. Travel is embodied learning that activates the fullest functioning of a human. It demands perception and observation, judgment, discriminating feeling, decision making, problem solving, self-control, deference, and understanding. All Juilliard undergraduates should travel to ground their book and studio learning in life. It would be marvelous if there were a travel component to a liberal arts course! But if I had to choose one place, I would send them all to India, because travel there challenges one's world view and the models by which one makes sense of life. It forces one to confront what is "other" in the world and "other" in oneself. What would people to be surprised to know about you? That I was both top athlete and top-ranking student in high school. That I am a terminal Red Sox fan (this is, however, a new century and the statute of limitations on curses has expired). That I have a sense of humor.
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