I was playing with Tweefind this morning, a Twitter search application that tries to apply a sort of ranking algorithm to “tweets,” and came across this page of reviews of Dickinson’s Selected Letters.

I wasn’t sure what to make of recommendations like “[a]s fascinating to the uranologist person as they are to the unplanned enthusiast, Dickinson’s letters — along with those of uranologist or histrion — establish that this is every taste as lawful a music as falsity or poetry.” Or, “Emily poet was a enthusiastic honor writer, in every senses of the word. In fact digit gets the notion that she actually desirable composition to people, than gathering and conversing with them, and for her the action of a honor was a enthusiastic event.” Though I did like this, which appears to be a translation from English to German and back to English, with a little help from Shel Sliverstein and Lewis Carroll:

“Father does not springy with us today — he lives in a newborn house. Though it was shapely in an distance it is meliorate than this. He hasn’t whatever garden because he touched after gardens were made, so we verify him the prizewinning flowers, and if we exclusive knew he knew, perhaps we could kibosh crying.”

I’m guessing there’s some odd API “magic” going on with items on the back list; other reviews on Wropl are less mangled. It appears that book reviews are being culled from Amazon’s international sites, and rendered into that special sort of prose that machines excel at composing.

Worry not, gentle reader; no such mangling goes on here at Daily Dickinson. The books that you see in the side bar and in the Daily Dickinson Amazon Store have been hand-picked specifically for the Dickinson aficionado. We’ve included collections of Dickinson poems, biographies, and critical studies; works of history and philosophy related to themes in Dickinson’s poetry; and works by other poets (like Rae Armantrout and Billy Collins) we think you’ll like.

No odd API calls, no keyword guessing, no “looking nervy to with stabbing anticipation,” just selections for the discriminating reader of poetry. Purchases help to keep the Daily Dickinson project sputtering along.

Jane writes of her visit to the two Dickinson homes, The Evergreens and The Homestead:

While The Homestead is decidedly ghost free, The Evergreens is not. … Today, the house is in a serious state of dilapidation, yet it retains most of the original contents. While dusty and seriously frayed, the chair Emerson is said to have occupied in the parlor looks as if he could emerge from another room and sit down once again to engage in conversation about the lecture he completed at Amherst College a mere 142 years ago. Yet, the house is eerie. When entering the dining room where Susan Dickinson entertained her guests, there is a noticeable drop in temperature (even in the summer). A chill hangs in the air over the table which looks as though it is set for a spectral dinner party.

I can’t think of a better recommendation for a museum visit than this:

The Evergreens is the saddest museum in America. If there are such things as ghosts, they surely walk at The Evergreens.

The Poetry Foundation podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf, has recently re-broadcast a piece about Rae Armantrout, “More Than Meets the I,” whom Ange Milenko calls “the scariest poet since Emily Dickinson.”

Readers who are drawn in by Dickinson’s gnomic, witty, sharp verse would be well-advised to try Armantrout. Like Dickinson, she takes on big topics–the nature of the self, the meaning of love and pity, the way language works or doesn’t–in brief, clever poems that pack much into a short space. Her poems are short, but by no means easy; they’re puzzling, sometimes inscrutable, and haunting.

The thrust of Milenko’s piece is that Armantrout stands apart from most contemporary American poets by her use (or, more often than not, non-use) of “I.” She’s not a confessional poet; we don’t learn anything significant about her private life from her poems, much the way Dickinson’s private life is veiled (and made that much more open to overwrought speculation for its invisibility). Instead, she offers a cool and detached “I,” an observer and commentator but not a participant.

It’s this detachment that makes her scary, in the way Dickinson can be scary. Armantrout doesn’t offer just pithy observations; she offers riddles about important things told in a seemingly off-handed manner. But she doesn’t offer answers to those riddles.

You can read more Armantrout at the Poetry Foundation site, or dip into some of her books:

• Next Life (Wesleyan Poetry)
• Versed (Wesleyan Poetry)
• Up to Speed (Wesleyan Poetry)
• Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Acacia Theatre Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will perform the world-premier production of Chris Cagan’s “Emily,” a play that tells the story of Emily Dickinson’s life, backwards. The play starts on Easter Sunday, 1860, when Dickinson was 29, and works back to 1848, when she was 17, tracing the origins of her disenchantment with religion and her growing seclusion from the outside world.

“The play begins with the end result – Emily’s seclusion – and works backward to a time when she was more social,” said Director Dr. David W. Eggebrecht. “It’s an interesting perspective, knowing what’s going to happen. It gives you insights into why she became the reclusive poet that she became. The traumas that occurred in her life accentuated her eccentricities and led her to become much more introspective.”

The playwright’s website has an excerpt from the play (in Microsoft Word format), a tense family dinner scene. Dickinson’s poetry is woven throughout, the play adding context to the verse while the poetry illuminates the domestic drama.

Readings of “Emily” have been performed at the Pacific Theatre in Vancouver and at the Drama Bookshop in New York City. Acacia’s performance will be its first full staging.

Performances will be given at 8 p.m. on Feb. 27, 8 p.m. on Feb. 28, 3 p.m. on March 1, 8 p.m. on March 5, 8 p.m. on March 6, 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. on March 7 and 3 p.m. on March 8.

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On January 12, 2009, the words of Emily Dickinson will return to the London Underground. Not, though, as part of the Poems on the Underground series, which has featured Much madness is divinest sense, I taste a liquor never brewed, and There came a Wind like a Bugle in the past.

Instead, two lines from Dickinson will be part of the British Humanist Association’s Atheist Bus campaign:

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we don’t believe
Does not exhilarate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate –
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

The campaign on the Underground will also feature Douglas Adams, Albert Einstein, and Katherine Hepburn. The choice–of Dickinson in general, and these words in particular–is thought-provoking.

Dickinson was certainly a skeptic. Though she lived in a world charged with religious and spiritual fervor–the last waves of the Second Great Awakening, Calvinist pietism, Emersonian Transcendentalism–she paddled against the general stream. Though she attended the Mount Holyoke Seminary, Dickinson never “converted” like so many of her peers. “Christ is calling everyone here,” she wrote in an 1850 letter, “all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion.”

But an atheist? I’m not entirely convinced. Dickinson’s approach to religion was certainly ironic, skeptical, sometimes sacrilegious, often playful. In her poems about death in particular, she strikes some pretty hard blows against religious beliefs. Safe in their alabaster chambers, for example, notes the eternal sleep of the “meek members of the resurrection” while “[g]rand go the years in the crescent above them”; Death, for Dickinson, is a particular Eternity, with no sounding trumpet on Judgment Day.

But God–or a god of some sort–is strongly present in many of her poems. In some cases, it seems to be a Calvinist God–remote, unknowable, harsh. In other cases, as in her poems about the loss of loved ones, there seems to be a consoling God:

They perished in the seamless grass, –
No eye could find the place;
But God on his repealless list
Can summon every face.

More often, “God” seems to be a metaphor for something–universal order, the grandeur of nature, time–larger than the individual. There’s much vastness in these short poems, and much wonder. Dickinson certainly rejects the trappings of church and piety, and is at the very least unorthodox, heretical, and strongly critical of religion. But she is very much of her time and place all the same, and not easily made to fit into contemporary atheist or humanist garb. If anything, she reminds me most of the Nontheist Friends, a particularly slippery sort of Quaker.

That the Atheist Bus campaign picked this particular Dickinson poem, and these specific lines, is interesting. It’s certainly an aphoristic statement, and it echoes the “stop worrying and enjoy your life” catchphrase of the campaign. But the second two lines–”Believing what we don’t believe / Does not exhilarate”–seems more consistent with Dickinson’s poetry, and, to be honest, much less trite; I could almost picture “That it will never come again / Is what makes life so sweet” printed on the pedestal of a “Precious Moments” figurine. There are better, more searing quotes available–her poem on the inefficacy of prayer, for example, or her playful mocking of a Heavenly afterlife:

I ‘m glad I don’t believe it,
For it would stop my breath,
And I ‘d like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.

We need to be careful when marshaling the dead to our contemporary causes, particularly the subtle dead like Dickinson. Her concerns were not necessarily ours, and her approach to doubt and faith much more nuanced than what we hear now on either side of the debate. I don’t know that she’d be bothered to be on the Atheist Bus posters–she’d probably find it more than a little funny–but her smile would be more than a touch wry.

Dickinson fans in western Massachusetts are encourage to attend The Belle of Amherst at Ventfort Hall (the Museum of the Guilded Age) in Lenox. This perennial evening with Emily runs through December 31st.

Says Normi Noel, who has directed with Shakespeare & Company:

The play is constructed very beautifully. The struggle for her to believe in herself, is very recognizable to any artist. The audience very clearly acts as her witness to that journey – how do you know that what you’re doing is worth doing?

Tickets for The Belle of Amherst are $20 per person. Reservations are encouraged due to limited performance space. For further information and to purchase tickets, call 413-637-3206. Ventfort Hall is located at 104 Walker Street in Lenox.

Daily Routines offers a look into the (often compulsive) schedules of “writers, artists, and other interesting people.” Subjects include Franz Kafka, Corbusier, Jasper Johns, and Karl Marx.

Emily Dickinson is represented with a schedule of her days at Mount Holyoke seminary. It’s a strict routine of studies, lectures, music practice, and meals.

It’s worth noting that during her time at Holyoke, Dickinson said of herself that “I am one of the lingering bad ones, and so do I slink away, and pause, and ponder, and ponder, and pause.” Perhaps that’s why she wrote of absence and tardiness and “ten thousand other things, which I will not take time or place to mention . . .”: to mention them in great detail would no doubt expose much of her inner life.

Michael Gordon offers a new musical and theatrical interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry with “Lightning at Our Feet” which combines music and film into a haunting atmosphere that brings Dickinson forward to the 21st century. The music is “virtuoso chamber music of a sort,” according to the review in the New York Times. From the excerpts available on YouTube, it’s reminiscent of the Cowboy Junkies enhanced by contemporary art music.

At the intersection of family history and literary scholarship, Carol Damon Andrews has found what may be the secret source of much of Emily Dickinson’s most interesting and passionate poetry: a doomed love affair with George Gould.

Gould was a student at Amherst College at the time, and a friend of Dickinson’s brother Austin. He worked on the Dickinson farm before going west to work on the railroads, and returned to Amherst to follow a career as a respected clergyman. And, according to the journal of Andews’ ancestor Ann Eliza Houghton Penniman, he was briefly engaged to Emily Dickinson, before her father “vetoed the whole affair, . . . and poor Emily’s heart was broken.”

Andrews is not the first to have proposed the Gould engagement theory; Genevieve Taggard explored the possibility in The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson in 1930, presenting the “purloined valentine” that Taggard argued was intended for Gould. 1930, though, was a bit too close still to 1886, and Taggard’s search for Dickinson’s doomed love affair was quashed by the Dickinson family and the scholarly world. Dickinson as lovelorn spinster remains the received image of her, rather than Dickinson the passionate young woman.

Published in the June issue of The New England Quarterly, Andrews’ article discloses not only the sketch of this doomed affair but also Dickinson’s early musical education. Both revelations are of interest to Dickinson scholars and readers: that the musicality of her poetry has its roots at an earlier age than previously suspected (she was eight years old in the Penniman journal), and that her aching, longing love poetry is grounded in an all-too-real disappointment, enrich our understanding of her poetry, and add a human dimension to the “Belle of Amherst” prism through which we too often see her life.

That there was a flesh and blood source for Dickinson’s love poems–often bitter, frequently playful, sometimes passionate–should not come as a surprise to those who’ve spent some time reading them. And should come, too, as a relief to those who have shared with Dickinson “the kind of early romantic entanglement and disappointment that so many young people have,” as Christopher Benfey has it in Slate, that she made something so extraordinary from such ordinary sources.