The New International Center has a new Web page, and also a new Facebook page.
The original International Center will close for good on Friday. It is a milestone in many people's lives. Lucy Benedikt, for example, has been there from before the beginning--she volunteered before the Center even opened, more than 50 years ago. She is the senior of hundreds of us volunteers.
I taught my first class at the International Center in December of 1985, the year I came to New York City from Connecticut. My last class ever at the International Center in New York was last night, April 17, 2012. We stopped on a line from my favorite poet to teach, "The Dry Salvages" from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.
I used to stop by the International Center to see my buddy Vladimir Malukoff, who used to be Program Director there. (My tenure at the Center is now more ancient than I was when I started.) Staff and volunteers used to ask me to teach, and I always declined, thinking that teaching wasn't for me. One particular day, a member of the staff asked me yet again if I would volunteer. I asked, "Can I teach a literature class?" She shrugged and said, "Whatever you would like." I said, "OK. She asked me when I could start, and I replied, "A week from Friday."
The first poem I taught was "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas. I had one or two people the first class. But I proceeded the way I have since, word by word, discussing definitions, meaning, context, history, culture, whatever comes to mind as we go. It was a success.
Since "Fern Hill", I have done many poems in my classes. And books: For ten years, we chugged through Ulysses by James Joyce. Three hours, every Saturday, word by word; digression; background; questions. It was slow going, and in those years we only got about 280 pages in. But some of my best moments as a teacher were during Ulysses. (I started the book a few weeks after my daughter was born. She was born on Bloomsday. When she was little, we used to refer to Ulysses as her "birthday book". She will be 18 on Bloomsday this year.) The Hobbit. Essays by Stephen Jay Gould. About 30 of the Cantos by Ezra Pound. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (three times each, over the years). On Saturday afternoons now, we are reading The Wind in the Willows, which has been a joyous find for several people. How can one not love Mole and Rat? Probably my greatest success is the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The current exigetical journey through Four Quartets is the third time I've traversed it at the International Center. We started with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and proceeded through "Gerontion", "Ash Wednesday", "Preludes", and "The Wasteland." What else? Short poems by William Carlos Williams. What else? I can't recall right now; so many.
My philosophy of teaching is to not dumb down to people because they are learning. Their English is still limited, but their minds are not. Language is a tool for the day-to-day, but there is no pleasure in that; why not teach by means of the most interesting ideas and the richest use of language? Poetry as text! I didn't want to teach the same things that others were doing when I started. "The...pen...is...on...the...table." Or the newspaper, or magazines. I felt I had a gift to bring words to life and to teach at the same time. So I used literature as the text. And people get to appreciate, feel, delight in, and learn from literature that they might not have the confidence to approach on their own. I remember one Japanese woman telling me she had been told sternly by her U.S.-born son that she could not read Ulysses because it is too difficult. Ha! She loved Poldy and the cat.
And my approach works. I was the first to teach English this way at the Center. Then others started doing it. Now there are others, and my students glow when they tell me the classics they have read in the other classes. Sometimes, they know the works from translation in their own country, sometimes it is new to them. But there is a feeling of pride and satisfaction that they have read and felt and understood such a book in their laboriously studied new language.
The moment when we reached the end of the fourth chapter of Ulysses (Calypso) and Adam Wroblewsky, who had come to the U.S. as a refuge with no English, read the last two words, "Poor Dignam", and suddenly understood them and gasped out loud in the class at the beauty and meaning of the words was perhaps the moment that validated these 25 years. So long as my brain is my own, I will remember and treasure that moment.
There have been many bad times, many strange, there have been days when it just seemed pointless. But through it all, poetry and sharing poetry has been my compass and my tether keeping me somewhat bound to my self. And the International Center has been my center as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment