National Punctuation Day

So perhaps there was a reason I was so inspired to talk punctuation with my classes today.

Editing Dickinson

One of the biggest areas of critical attention in Emily Dickinson studies is the way she has been--and should be--edited and published. People have fought over this ever since Dickinson's sister found those fascicles of poems neatly bound up in her sister's bedroom. It is an area of some interest to me as I continue to work on a project about editing in the nineteenth century. My interests here extend to the classroom as well.

I've blogged before about the way that Emily Dickinson helps us talk about the significance of things like dashes, italics, and quotations marks in poetry. When I teach Dickinson, I like to have the poems on the Smartboard in class, so that we can read them and mark them up. In order to prepare for today's ENG 204 course, I painstakingly transcribed the poems as published in the Norton Anthology into a word document so that I could use them in class. For Dickinson, this kind of transcription is necessary since simply cutting and pasting from a website won't work as web editions differ in their use of capitalization, dashes, etc.

Several of these poems, of course, I had taught before--out of the 6th edition of the Norton Anthology, so I already had those in Word documents. Those, I thought, I can just cut and paste.

Not so fast. Check out these competing versions of a poem often referred to as "'Faith' is a fine invention":

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see-
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.


"Faith" is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!

The first version is from the 6th edition, the edition we used at Shepherd up until this semester. The second is from the 7th edition. A quick look at the introductions to Dickinson in each book gives us an explanation. The first is based on Thomas H. Johnson's 1960 The Poems of Emily Dickinson. The second version is from R.W. Franklin's 1999 The Poems of Emily Dickinson.

I suppose it makes sense to use the Franklin edition since so many scholars have argued that it is more accurate than Johnson's. But in this case, I can't help but feel that the change is for the worse and that this poem's impact suffers in the Franklin version. The differences might seem small, but when we are talking about a four line poem, small is a relative term.

Notice the deletion of the italics on "Microscopes" in the second version. This takes away the attention and emphasis given to this very important word and its linkage to "see" in the second line. Notice, too, the change from "When Gentlemen can see" to "For Gentleman who see!" The second version implies that some gentlemen see and some don't, and that idea certainly changes the meaning of the poem. Finally, do notice those exclamation points, completely absent from the first version, but popping up in two dramatic places in the second. They really don't seem to work either, adding lots of drama to a poem that I've always read as a relatively calm and witty observation. Anyway, I really prefer the earlier version, as you can maybe tell already.

Apparently, Dickinson herself is to blame for some of the confusion, as she sent the different versions to different people in letters. I find myself wishing I owned a copy of this edition that reproduces Dickinson's manuscripts so I can see how she wrote it down in the fascicles.

When I pulled the earlier version up on the Smartboard and noticed the differences between it and the textbook, I was thrown off my game--significantly. The students thought it was all pretty funny and much ado about nothing. So yes, I was a bit flustered by the differences (and there were slight changes in other poems, too). But one of them did ask, "Well, what difference does it make if the line is 'For gentlemen who see'?" And that opened up some good discussion about the very issue I mentioned at this entry--because it does make a difference. Those exclamation points change things. Those italics are important. But perhaps, unintentionally, I was able to get that point across to students more effectively than ever before.

In praise of the semicolon...

I've been meaning to link to this little article about a much-abused bit of punctuation: the semicolon.

Here's a weird little paragraph worth singling out just because of its weirdness--and the wittiness of the final line (the one in parentheses):

"One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)"

What is it about this time of the semester that gets me thinking about punctuation so much more than usual? Ah yes--midterm week, complete with piles of questionably-punctuated papers to grade.

Emily Dickinson, air quotes, and a blog

I just got done teaching a section of my English 204 class. On the schedule for the day: Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson days always make me happy--even when after only ten minutes or so it is pretty clear that most of the class didn't read closely enough, if at all. Anyway, one of the poems we discussed was this perfect and witty four-liner:

"Faith" in a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see--
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency

It's a fantastic poem about how we feel just fine about our faith until a moment of crisis, when believing without seeing isn't very easy. So here I am trying to explain this to my class. With Dickinson (especially for beginners) a line by line reading tends to work best. And this kind of close attention can be very rewarding with a poet like Dickinson, who does so many interesting things with punctuation, capitalization, italics, and yes, even quotation marks.

Anyway, here I am, starting at the beginning, and asking students what we should think about Dickinson putting quotation marks around "Faith" in that first line. I met with that familiar wall of silence. So I tried another strategy, asking them what it means when we put "air quotes" around something we are saying. And Lord help me, all I could think of were dirty examples: "He and I were 'studying' all night long," "I'm really good at 'anatomy.'" [This supports Vogel's theory that I am the dirtiest teacher she knows. I don't think this is true, by the way.] The students, of course, got a big kick out of that. Beyond the laughs, though, they started to see the point--the quotation marks actually often indicate that we should take the word to mean something very different than what it would mean without them. They began to see the subversive value of those quotation marks. So what Dickinson is calling "Faith" isn't really faith at all. Once we got this down, they were able to grasp the rest of the poem much more easily.

This whole story (perhaps only interesting to nerds like myself) illustrates so well why Dickinson is an invaluable resource for teaching English. She makes us realize the differences that dashes, italics, and exclamation points make. And she does it in ways that students understand. Consider the closing lines of "After great pain, a formal feeling comes--":

As freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

In this poem (one of my favorites), Dickinson is writing about a pain (the death of a loved one, a great loss) so severe that it threatens to destroy the sufferer. She creates that powerful and haunting image of freezing to death in these last lines--of the eventual slipping away into unconsciousness and death. The dash therefore, is such a perfect way to end the poem. I asked my students, "Why a dash? Why not a period?" And they got it: it implies that drifting off, that lack of a clean, neat, and definite ending. They understood why. This can even open doors to discussions of editing and editions, always a contentious topic in Dickinson studies. And all of this is possible at an undergraduate, non-major level. Awesome.

All of this also reminded me of a kind of silly blog I recently discovered: The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. It's really quite funny and worth visiting.