The Lady in White

Today, if my math hasn’t failed me, would be Emily Dickinson’s 182 birthday.  She has been a favorite poet of mine since I first studied her as an undergraduate.  And as a teacher, I spent, perhaps, too much class time on her poems.  I had my favorites, and we had to cover some of the famous ones--“Because I could not stop for death” for example--and I have little doubt that I overdid Dickinson.  I usually showed the video of Julie Harris’s Tony Award winning performance in The Belle of Amherst, a video I still have and still watch occasionally.

In March of 1993 I had just covered Dickinson in class when my mom died.  It was a very difficult time, of course, but I was greatly heartened when one of my favorite classes gave me the gift of one of my most loved Dickinson poems beautifully mounted and framed; I still have it, treasure it, and have it displayed prominently in my apartment:

                       318

I'll tell you how the Sun rose --
A Ribbon at a time --
The Steeples swam in Amethyst --
The news, like Squirrels, ran --
The Hills untied their Bonnets --
The Bobolinks -- begun --
Then I said softly to myself --
"That must have been the Sun"!
But how he set -- I know not --
There seemed a purple stile
That little Yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while --
Till when they reached the other side,
A Dominie in Gray --
Put gently up the evening Bars --
And led the flock away --

Dickinson’s influence on poets is enormous, and I recently ran across a poem that I think reflects that influence.  Not stylistically, of course, but in matters of the heart--and in coming to terms with the loss of someone dear--I think this modern poem by Andrea Cohen is a direct descendant of the poetry of The Lady in White, Emily Dickinson:

The Committee Weights In

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says.  Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.

Books to Movies

When I was teaching, my policy was to not show movies of books.  There were two exceptions, which I’ll get to in a minute, but in my classroom we didn’t watch movies based on the works of literature we were studying in class.  Plays, especially Shakespeare, of course, even, rarely, an opera, and certainly musical theater pieces (my students loved Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods).  But no movies from books.  My theory--my philosophy--on the subject was simple: we were studying literature, and I felt it was important for students to respond to and remember the book, not the movie.  I’m not naive enough to know that many students resorted, in the early years, to Cliff Notes, and, later, to SparkNotes.com.  And no doubt some watched movie versions of books rather than read them.  I couldn’t stop it and didn’t really try, although I would make pop quizzes based on events or descriptions not covered in the summary guides.  A good example of this was that dreadful film version of The Scarlet Letter with Demi Moore.  If a student, in his essays, began to talk about hot tub scenes and Indian raids, I knew he or she had watched the movie and not read the book.  But generally, I felt like it was their loss, and I didn’t make a big deal of it.  If I couldn’t encourage a student to read and enjoy a work of literature, then the failure was mine more than theirs.

What brought all this back was watching last week the new movie of Life of Pi.  It’s a fine film and I encourage you to see it.  Visually, it’s stunning.  And, for a movie, it’s relatively true to the novel.  There were some added scenes and several scenes I looked forward to seeing that weren’t there.  But over all, not a bad job.  And it works well in 3-D.  But were I teaching the book would I show it?  Not on your tintype!  Especially now, with reading apparently on the decline, it’s even more important for English teachers to stress reading.  Even if it’s on a Kindle, which is how I read Life of Pi the second time.  It’s the reading that counts.

The exceptions to my rule?  First was To Kill a Mockingbird.  It’s such a superior film that I felt that showing it to students (9th grade, usually) would only encourage more reading.  It helped that students generally loved Mockingbird and would often read it without much pushing.  The other exception: laziness of my part.  I don’t actually remember doing this, but I’m sure back in my early days of teaching, I dragged out a movie when I needed a paper-grading break or just a break from facing the little darlings.  Like I say, I don’t remember doing this; but I know me well enough to know I almost surely did.  Hey, I never promised perfection.