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Connie Clark as Emily Dickinson for Grades K-12 |
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K-2, 3-5:The focus is on the historic period, and what life was like |
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during Emily's time (1830-1886) . . . what it would have been like to be in grammar school when Emily was, what daily life was like (e.g., what clothing was like, how rugs were cleaned, what chores children performed, what schools were like). Some of Emily's humorous poems told from a child's perspective are recited. The purpose is to make poetry seem less "odd" to the children, and more of a "fun" way to express yourself. |
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6-8:With grades 6-8, an increasing amount of the performance deals |
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with some of Emily's options for her life and the choices she made. This is the transition program between those for the child and that for the young adult. 19th century poetry is covered in a simplified manner, with the focus on styles popular then and what made Emily's style so different. Several of Emily's poems are recited, both humorous ones and some that are a bit heavier. The purpose is to make poetry seem less "odd" to the students, and more easily appreciated as a means of expressing one's thoughts and feelings. Emily Dickinson was the class clown at Amherst Academy in her young days, and the friendly wit Emily herself used with her school friends is the style of presentation used in the performance. As the performance moves along, students get to know about Emily's own family and her daily life. Invariably, the students feel Emily to be their friend by the end of the performance. The K-8 programs are interactive, with Emily asking the students questions, and their asking her questions as the performance moves along.
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9-12:Unlike the K-8 performances, that for grades 9-12 is fully scripted. |
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Students are meeting Emily Dickinson now in their own time, a visitor from the nineteenth century who is able to join them in the present in such a way that they come to understand how different Dickinson's world was from their own, and why the choices she made for her life were the only logical ones she could have made. |
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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), older daughter of the most prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts; eight or ten poems published anonymously during her lifetime; first collection of poems published 1890; principally wore white; lived reclusively; now considered one of America's greatest poets. And ever since her poems were first published, Dickinson has been dogged with the cliches of the Frustrated Lover, the New England Nun, the Moth of Amherst, the Woman in White, the Neurotic. But as Richard B. Sewall begins his internationally celebrated The Life of Emily Dickinson, "Almost nothing to do with Emily Dickinson is simple and clear-cut . . . . Seemingly with willful cunning and surely with an artist's skill, she avoided direct answers to the major questions that anyone interested in her as a poet or person might have been moved to ask . . . . She kept her private life private. It is not that she said nothing about herself at any time; she said a great deal in nearly eighteen hundred poems and over a thousand letters. But it is as if she lived out the advice she gave in her famous lines: 'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -/Success in Circuit lies.' She avoided specifics, dodged direct confrontations, reserved commitments. She told the truth, or an approximation of it, so metaphorically that scholars still grope for certainties." Emily came to realize very early who she was and what she was intended for, and her adult life represented a conscious choice as she explored her own mind and her own spirit. As she herself said,
"Paradise is no Journey because it is within - but for that very cause - it is the most Arduous of Journeys . . ." |
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