Yes, He Does Digress

Which is why Barry Smolin, who is supposed to be teaching James Joyce, is kneeling on a desk in the middle of his classroom, giving a dramatic reading of Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

He is a small man of 45 in black jeans and chalk-dusted black T-shirt. As 31 high school seniors listen, more or less rapt, he intones:

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

"Dylan Thomas," Smolin says, "is talking about wise men who tried to shed light on the world and at the end realize they failed. Life, in other words, sucks, but even so, they don't want to die -- they still rage, rage against the dying of the light. It's like Woody Allen said in 'Annie Hall' -- do you guys know that movie? -- life is full of pain, misery and suffering, but it's over all too quickly."

Smolin actually is teaching Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man" to his sweat-shirted charges in the humanities magnet program at Alexander Hamilton High School. The novel's hero, Stephen Dedalus, has written a villanelle, a rigorously structured 19-line poem, and to illustrate that form, Smolin digresses to the Thomas work because it's one of the best villanelles in English.

To Smolin, a penchant for digression is "a sign of an active mind making connections." Thus he leads the students from the poem to the disquisition about death, and then back to the Joyce text, and Dedalus' refusal to perform his Easter duty (Catholics' mandatory taking of communion around Easter time) with the declaration, "I will not serve."

Another juicy digression having wandered into range, Smolin pounces. "Who recognizes that language?" he asks. "It's what the angel Lucifer supposedly said to God before he was cast out of heaven to become Satan." He strides to the blackboard and writes the Latin: "Non serviam -- I will not serve."

As reflected in his teaching, Smolin's ultimate subject isn't James Joyce or arcane poetic forms, but the unity of the life experience, a concept reflected in his own life as educator, father of three, pianist, singer/songwriter, disc jockey, poet and blogger.

"As I see it," he says, "it's all teaching."