Max in Bronze - A poem by Arthur Feinsod

Spoken by Christopher Austin
Animation by Ethan Newport
Augmented Reality by Arthur Feinsod
(Sculpture: Max Ehrmann at the Crossroads by Bill Wolfe)

Point your smartphone at the image below:


A bronze of American poet Max Ehrmann sits on a bronze bench, with space for another beside him, at the corner of 7th and Wabash, the so-called "Crossroads of America."  Even though his most famous poem is the great wisdom poem "Desiderata," displayed on a plaque near him, the sculpture shows him at the moment he completes his poem "Terre Haute."  If this silent, still figure could speak his grounded day thoughts and his more airborne night thoughts, of his frustrations about his fate and identity and of his deepest longings, those thoughts and feelings might sound something like this.

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Dr. Arthur Feinsod is Professor Emeritus from Indiana State University.  Between 2001 and 2014, he was Artistic Director of Crossroads Repertory Theatre and, in 2016, co-founded Theatre 7, for which he directed Death of a Salesman and Gospel of Everyman, a verse adaptation of the Medieval Morality Play.  Recently he won a regional BroadwayWorld award for best director of a stream (Agnes of God).  In spring 2022 he directed Our Town at Nebraska Repertory Theatre starring Christopher Austin. Besides being an award-winning teacher, Feinsod is a scholar (The Simple Stage, Greenwood Press, 1991) and playwright (Sword Against the Sea, adaptation of W.B.Yeats’ Cuchulain plays and poems published by Samuel French and Coming to See Aunt Sophie about Holocaust hero Jan Karski, produced in the Midwest, Germany, Poland, and Australia). Since 2018 he has written and lectured on faith subjects and is President of the InterFaith Council of the Wabash Valley.

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