Ovid in England, Ovid in Iowa

I'm currently teaching a class on "Ovid in England" at the University of Iowa, and after the students got a bit of Ovid under their belts I asked them to do their own, creative, metamorphosis. I got the idea from my esteemed colleague David Hamilton, who has recently retired from the department and from his role editing the Iowa Review, but who still gets far more mail than me (his box is just above mine, and he still ambles in, from time to time, to empty it and pass along his words of wisdom).

by Leonie Sparling, 2012

In recent years, I've been incorporating creative projects into nearly every course I teach, asking students to produce a creative work in any media and to give me a brief analysis that relates it to the subject matter in the course. The approach has major trade offs: the students, especially the better ones, get passionate about it, and I often get some of their most thoughtful and provocative work. On the other hand, I also have to wade through a lot of pretty bad poetry...but I've written a bit of that myself, and I am a firm believer that even bad poetry, when written with a good heart, can serve a useful purpose.

This year, I gave a prize to the best project: my copy of Dave Tomar's The Shadow Scholar, which I recently reviewed in The New Republic. (If you read the review, you'll know this was kind of a booby prize: but I thought perhaps the winner could trade it for something better). Anyway, my winning entry shows why I love these sorts of assignments.

This is a pencil drawing by Leonie Sparling, and it is about 5 feet tall and quite impressive in person. Better yet, she has a wonderful narrative that describes its genesis: it is the aition of a tropical flower that blossoms only when it enters a symbiotic relationship with the taller trees around it, climbing them, from the forest floor, to bloom at the top of the canopy. For Leonie, this is a story of jealosy and pride -- a realization that one must rely on others. What I like about it is that it is difficult to tell if that realization is painful or ecstatic, which is exactly the sort of ambiguity we've been exploring in Ovid and those who adapt him. And (this will make sense in light of The Shadow Scholar): I'm pretty sure you can't order such a work from a custom cheating service....

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