Students from Professor Steve Carr's course, "Making the Book," presented their work at an exciting panel titled "Making and Remaking Songs of Innocence."
Colin Del Duke presented a "remake" of William Blake's poem, "A Poison Tree" by painting the poem on a trench coat that he had bought at Goodwill. Emphasizing the poem's theme of deception and cloaking, Del Duke imagined the trench coat as representing the way in which the speaker of the poem cloaks his true feelings with "deceitful wiles." A major in biology, Del Duke commented, "This was my favorite class of all the classes I've taken at Pitt."
English Literature and Writing major Elise Hoffman reimagined Blake's poem, "The Little Boy Lost," as a spiral that would move the reader through space. The visual experience of the reader of searching (sometimes unsuccessfully) for the words that are further and further away mimics the boy's search for his father in the dark night. Hoffman commented that she appreciated the way the course gave her "hands-on experience with how books are structured."