From: Judy Schachter <schachte>
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 09:06:21 -0500

Although my teaching role up to now has been as a library media specialist and one long-ago year as a high school English teacher, this semester I am teaching my 10th grade daughter English 10 at home with a specialized curriculum created just for her. It includes a poetry unit of Emily Dickinson and Gwendolyn Brooks. (the at-school Eng. 10 course has little by *any* woman writer, poet, novelist, dramatist, etc. etc.!) So I appreciated your list of new poetry books, Ginny, particularly the new anthology by Liz Rosenberg . Based on my own admittedly not extensive search for resources, Emily Dickinson appears not to get much attention in anthologies for young adults . Such lack of exposure can lead to an attitude that she's an "easy" or "cute" poet . We overcame this initial reaction by my daughter, for example, by my picking 12 poems from the excellent collection "Final Harvest" for us to study. Another book at the other end of the spectrum that we also really enjoyed is a picture book by Barbara Cooney, "Emily," (written by Michael Bedard) which enriched our appreciation of her poetry by showing that writing was indeed her serious profession. (People thought she was a recluse-- but we believe she just need to sleep during the day after writing all night.) Serendipitously we have studied poetry during each weekend of National Poetry Month !

Judy Schachter Angell Elementary School 1608 S. University Ann Arbor, MI 48104 schachte at aaps.k12.mi.us
Received on Fri 14 Apr 2000 09:06:21 AM CDT