Poverty to Democracy is topic of talk by Harper's contributing editor

Earl Shorris, contributing editor of Harper's Magazine will talk about A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy in a public lecture at 8 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 20 in 220 Kane.

Three years ago, in the borrowed conference room of a family therapy clinic on the Lower East Side of New York City, Shorris began an experiment in teaching the humanities to the poor. The idea began in years of field research among the multi-generati onal poor across America and then was crystalized by a single comment made by a woman in a maximum security prison.

Shorris had come to understand multi-generational poverty as existence within a "surround of force." He had seen people panicked, forced by circumstance into a life of reaction, with little or no time for reflective thinking. The poor, he realized, did not live the "political life" at any level, from the family to the community to the state. They were powerless, made to live according to the rules of force.

When the prisoner suggested that people were poor because they had no contact with the humanities, Shorris resolved to test the thesis. Could the humanities rescue the poor from the surround of force? Shorris' goal was "to make the poor dangerous, as a ll citizens are dangerous in a democratic society."

In its third year, operating in Mexico as well as the United States, the Clemente Course in the Humanities has gone beyond the experimental stage. Shorris will discuss the course, how it changed the students, how it became part of a newfound respect fo r the humanities and for the poor.

Shorris graduated from the University of Chicago, as the youngest student to have entered the college. He is the author of 10 books, including New American Blues: A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy (1997); has been published in numerous mag azines such as The Nation; and can be heard as a commentator on Marketplace, produced by Public Radio International. In 1995 he founded the Clemente Course in the Humanities, (described in Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1997), an experiment in tea ching university level humanities to the long-term poor, which is now under the auspices of Bard College.

The lecture, sponsored by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Washington Commission for the Humanities, is complimentary and the public is invited to attend. ¶