By Michael Kelly and Jamie Redmond
The poet Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1907 and died in 1963 of a severe chill, the result of his spending some time in a cave recording sounds for BBC radio. MacNeice’s parents originally hailed from the West of Ireland, and he was the product of an Irish nationalist mother and Protestant father. As an adult, MacNeice chose to live in England where he felt alienated, as he did in Ireland, both North and South. MacNeice, in some of his most beautiful poems, transposes this feeling of alienation into a celebration of the plurality of the world. He believes that our recognizing and our embracing these differences and contrasts make our world beautiful. In his poetry he uses the often mundane rhythms of speech and clunky words to produce a beauty that stuns:
“World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.”
from “Snow”, by Louis MacNeice 1967
On Tuesday at MBA, we celebrated “things being various” with Mix It Up Day. Led by faculty members, Annie B. Williams, Jake Lawrence and Jamie Redmond, and student leaders Emanuel Barrett, Brycen Brown, Jacob Hanai, Kiran Peterson and Ashton Terrell, the school day began with free donuts in the quad. At break, the quad was flooded with students playing ping pong, corn hole and tackling the hoola hoop. Mauro Mastropasqua, Joseph Dattilo, Reed Ragsdale, Ian Durelli and Brantley Golczynski, under the baton of Jan Pippin & Jordan Frederick, provided the music. The real business began at lunch where the students were invited to sit at tables labeled with their birth months. The hope was that the boys would break bread and chat with students from various grades and with different interests and backgrounds. The event was a great success with the students entering into the event in with positivity and curiosity.
