Last night, 20 April 2016, I attended a commemoration in poetry and song at The Catholic University of America honoring the Easter Rising. Her Excellency Anne Anderson, 17th Irish Ambassador to the U.S., launched the evening with two short contemporary poems.
Coilin Owens (l.), Joyce scholar. and Michael Whelan, poet.
Dr. Coilin Owens concluded the event discussing the aftereffects and lingering significance of the Easter Rising 1916.
“I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.”
–W.B. Yeats, From “Easter 1916.”
Author: Richard
I grew up in Philadelphia where I graduated from La Salle University in 1968, the "Year of Revolting Students." I had changed my major from Philosophy to German to, finally, English (special interest: 1870-1914).
Having made solemn monastic vows as a Benedictine monk at Saint John's Abbey, I earned in Iowa City a masters of arts degree in Library and Information Science, 1974. A few years later I served as an intern in Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK, 1979-80.
For almost five years I oversaw the microfilming of medieval manuscripts in Durham, UK, and several sites in Germany for the abbey's Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (www.hmml.org).
In August 2016 I completed seven years with the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, Silver Spring, MD. I returned to the monastery in central Minnesota in a red 2007 Toyota Corolla from the abbey fleet.
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