ABSTRACT
Th is is the poet Adrienne Rich urging us on to clarity, to thoughtfulness, to a new kind of awareness. I read it with a peculiar sense of relevance in what to me is a time of crisis. Two days ago we read of President Bush’s veto of a bill intended to place limits on the kinds of interrogation the CIA use with suspected terrorists. Many of us could not but associate this to the talk of waterboarding, the practice of rendition, the pictures of our soldiers torturing and degrading Iraqi prisoners, what we know and do not know about Guantanamo, and prison cells where prisoners are refused contact with the outside world. All this adds up for me to crisis-a moral crisis, a political crisis, and (I would hope, at least for some of us) a personal crisis. But how are we to respond? What sort of pedagogy is called for in what some call “exceptional times”? How can we create environments in our classrooms that are provocative and sustaining? How can we open the way for dialogue, for the posing of diffi cult questions, for acknowledgement of the unanswerable?
