Architectural Building Engineering Technology and Interior Design Technology , above, and Mechanical Design students, below, work in the new labs.

If you take a walk around the NEIT campus it is hard not to notice the changes that have taken place since July 2001. With an 11,000 square foot building renovation now complete, the project has put a new look on the first and second floors of the Gouse Building, the first building ever built at the college's Warwick campus.

 After the Building Construction and Cabinetmaking Technology program, formerly located in the Gouse Building, moved to its new home across Post Road, the Gouse Building renovations began. A second floor was added to the laboratory space, vacated by the Building Construction and Cabinetmaking Technology program. This new floor is now the home of the college's Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL) and also houses six new offices for the Admissions department.

Several new labs for the college's growing programs in Architectural Building Engineering Technology, Manufacturing Engineering Technology, Mechanical Design Technology and Interior Design Technology were built on the first floor space, below the Office of Teaching and Learning. Two new Computer Aided Design (CAD) labs as well as a larger manufacturing lab now occupy this space. A new classroom/laboratory for the college's Electronics Technology has also been added to the Gouse Building.

The general contractor for the project was Dennis Leonardo Builder, Inc. of Swansea, Massachusetts. The architect for the project was Bob Stillings of Architectural Resources, who received assistance from the faculty of the college's Architectural Building Engineering Technology department. According to NEIT's director of Auxiliary Services, Patrick Tracey, who coordinated the entire renovation project, "I'm especially pleased with the results of this project because we were able to create over 2,000 square feet of attractive office space for OTL out of thin air, essentially, by in-filling a void rather than building an addition. The renovated space on the first floor is much more open, and the generous use of glass in both the new and existing CAD labs allows more people to enjoy the benefits of natural light."

The renovations to the Gouse Building are not only dramatic, but another example of the college's commitment to quality laboratory and classroom space for all of its students.

Award-winning Rhode Island Poet Visits New England Tech

Winner of the 2001 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, writer Peter Johnson delivered a guest lecture Monday evening, September 9 in Professor Don Soucy's course, Literature: Form and Function. Johnson, who teaches at Providence College, is founder and editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal. And it was as editor, writer, and teacher that he consented to talk to our students.

In class, Johnson read from his current collection of prose poems, Miracles & Mortifications (White Pine Press, 2001) and from his short fiction. A specialist in the prose poem, Johnson traces his influences to the fables and absurdist humor of Franz Kafka. "I'm a wise guy," he said in explanation of his work. "I'm not one to see poetry as something solemn or bloodless; I want people to laugh, or to gasp out loud when they read me." And considering the titles of some of his work, "Post-Mortem Jacket Cover," "The Hooligan Zoo," and "19th Hole Condom Poem," it's easy to see that the appeal of his work rests not just in the formal clarity of his style, but also in the cheeky, often robust jokes contained in it.

Johnson also commented on the work of the students in the class, who had been assigned a writing exercise for the purpose of exploring short fiction and the prose poem form. The prose poem, as writer Charles Simic has explained, combines lyric poetry and the fable, jokes and fairy tales. They are the "literary equivalent of peasant dishes...which bring together a variety of ingredients and flavors, and which in the end, thanks to the art of the cook, somehow blend." Prose poems are a good forum for renegades and misfits; as Johnson himself asserted in his lecture, "Art should challenge the mainstream; it should be subversive and a bit anarchic."

His comments to the aspiring writers in the class were generous and insightful; he focused on imagery and word play, and complimented the writers on their ability to take episodes and memories of their own lives and transform them into polished pieces. One example he liked particularly, from Tim Arcelay, a BS student in CIS:

Mogadishu

As I sit here I say to myself, "Who am I?...What am I doing here?" I come here to find myself. I've come here to help others find themselves. There is much madness here, yet there is peacefulness here. I can be a savior, or I can be a nobody. I can be a leader, or I can be a follower. My plan is to be here shortly, but like the Rangers in Somalia, my initiative has changed. I came here to find out who I am, but now I wonder who that is. Who is that over there, snapping twigs in the bush? Mosquitoes buzz by my ears like bullets ricocheting off the sides of buildings. This is my home away from home. When I leave here, I will know who I am, but only until I forget. After reading several examples of this kind of writing, Johnson complimented the class on their work. "These are very good, but that's because you've lived life," he said; "your work reflects your experiences. Poems should be about lives lived." Johnson, who worked for five years in the steel mills of Buffalo, NY before finishing college, answered several questions about his own work and then autographed books presented by the students. For some students, it was a first-time encounter with a living, breathing author, and as one student opined on his way out, "I didn't think I'd like this, but I really liked this. It was fun." Fun is not a word commonly associated with poets and poems, but it is the kind of response often elicited by the works of this gifted writer and teacher. Peter Johnson's books of prose poems include Pretty Happy! (White Pine Press, 1997), and Love Poems for the Millenium (Quale Press, 1998). His collection of short stories, I'm a Man, won the Rainbow Press 1997 Fiction Chapbook Contest, and in 1999 he was awarded a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Writer Peter Johnson speaks with students