Delights of the mind

From Tulsa World
By JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer

Art, history and memory merge in Ben Henneke’s ‘mosaic’ verse

One day about three years ago, Ben Henneke saw a pair of doves.

It wasn’t the first time Henneke — president-emeritus of the University of Tulsa and a former professor of English and the humanities — had seen these particular birds. They are the subject of a photograph that adorns a wall in his apartment in St. Simeon’s residential complex.

But on this particular cool misty morning, the sight of those two avian figures stirred something in Henneke’s mind.

“The whole atmosphere of that morning — the way the sun was behind the mist, the coolness of that day — made me feel the same way I felt when I was somewhere else,” Henneke said. “As I thought about that, my eyes happened upon that picture of the two doves.”

The photograph of doves is really a picture of a picture — an image Henneke made of a section of Roman-era mosaics that adorn church buildings in the Italian town of Ravenna.

“It had always been in the back of my mind to do something about the mosaics there at Ravenna,” said Henneke, who first visited the town in the late 1960s. “And I suppose it was that morning that re-stimulated my interest.”

So Henneke set to work on what would become “A Ravenna Mosaic.” The book, which is published by TU, is — in Henneke’s words — “An Account in Verse of Personal Reactions to the Colored Tiles That Make Up Christian Art in Ravenna in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries, When That City Was a Capital of the Roman Empire.”

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