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A Sari in the Land of the Secular For Shoba Narayan, an international student at MHC in 1987, deciding to wear a sari for one month--to show her American three-year-old daughter that "she could melt into the pot while retaining her individual flavor"--was a surprising exercise in discovery. In the March 13 "My Turn" column of Newsweek, Narayan writes that she grew up wearing the traditional attire for weddings and holidays in her native India, but found that the elegant garment--all six yards of it--forced her to shorten her strides on the streets of New York and to stay clear of crowded subways, lest she become unraveled. "Like a souffle, it is fragile," she writes. She credits her sari with provoking questions and smiles from strangers and kindness from cabbies, but ultimately she opted to revert to "sensible khakis" and "become American again."

Poetry in Motion The poetry of Peter Viereck, MHC professor emeritus of history, was noted as "the best in America today" by the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, in a 1970 interview with Brodsky by Lynette Labinger '71, to be published in the spring 2000 issue of Agni. The issue will also include four new Viereck poems from his unpublished book Door. Other work by Viereck is forthcoming in the inaugural issue of a New York magazine, Red Envelope, and in a new edition of the anthology Western Wind, edited by John Frederick Nims, to be published by Random House. Viereck's own poems, and eight translations by him, including work by Goethe, Stefan George, and Pushkin, are included in the recent anthology World Poetry, edited by Katharine Washburn. Published by Norton, the anthology was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.

What's new with you? Send news for "New & Notable" to Janet Tobin, Office of Communications, or email jtobin@mtholyoke.edu.