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.
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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.
After our long summer hiatus (which is not in any way to be confused with a vacation…), the Daily Dickinson poetry feed will resume on August 20, 2008. Enough daily poems are queued up to keep things rolling on a daily schedule for a good while.
Also starting on August 20: the Weekly Whitman site will do with Walt Whitman what Daily Dickinson has done with Emily Dickinson (though on a weekly rather than daily basis): regular poetry features, a photograph that captures the mood of the verse, and the occasional odd bit of news and linkage.
On the surface, no two poets are more dissimilar than Dickinson and Whitman. I think of Dickinson’s wry smile and ironic voice, against Whitman’s boisterous laugh and barbaric yawp; Whitman’s scatter shot verse against Dickinson’s precision; the tight, structured lines of Dickinson suspended between dashes, against the sprawling lines of Whitman that are too large to be contained by human pages; Whitman abroad in the world, roaming beyond the world, and Dickinson secluded in her rooms and garden while her mind travels through strange eternities.
And yet, these two poets share quite a lot as well. They are unmistakably American, making new kinds of poetry and inventing their own languages to express modern ideas. They are deeply concerned with the Soul–both tend to capitalize the word–but not so much concerned with orthodoxy. Strong personalities both, and complex; both contain, and revel in, their contradictions.
The pleasures of reading Dickinson and Whitman are certainly different; Whitman’s voice is thrilling in its cadences and in love with its loudness, while Dickinson invites us in close for whispered secrets that we may not understand until long after we’ve read her lines. But pleasure a-plenty lurks in both.
Dickinson fans in the Boston area can check out Beth Goldman as Emily Dickinson at the Waltham Public Library, 735 Main Street, Waltham, MA. The performance begins at 7:30 PM.
Goldman has played Dickinson in the full-length “The Belle of Amherst,” from which “Tea with Emily Dickinson” is adapted, with the Walpole Footlighters. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet Emily Dickinson for anyone who doesn’t have a time machine handy.
According to the Dublin Evening Herald, people waiting at the Naas Hospital Kildare and other places around the region will have the chance to read a little poetry instead of just out-of-date celebrity rags and old medical journals.
Poems in the Waiting Room is a pilot arts project funded by Kildare County Council. The idea was driven by Kildare-based writer Kate Dempsey.
It was inspired by pieces of public sculpture dotted across the country. The idea is to make poetry an art form that is available in ordinary everyday places.
The project has a web site, too, from which you can download a poster-sized version of Dickinson’s “Hope,” watch Alan Rickman recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), or read Leigh Hunt’s Jenny Kissed Me, a sweet little poem about Thomas Carlyle’s wife.
Similar to the various poems-on-public-transit projects, like the recent Wilkes-Barrie Poetry in Transit or the famous Poems on the Underground in London, the Poems in the Waiting Room project seeks to slip poetry into the fallow spaces of our lives and enrich the unsuspecting with a few well-chosen words. Given the rate at which video monitors and loud music have colonized gas pumps and grocery-store lines, this incursion of verse is certainly welcome.
In the Boston Review, Maureen McLane explores the intriguing possibility of Emily Dickinson as a poet of terror:
Terror as perspectival experience. A “War on Terror” necessarily lodges itself within. Duct Tape. Code Red. Enriched Uranium. We are called to feel a general, perhaps fraudulent, fright, an ecstasy of alertness:
It sets the Fright at liberty—
And Terror’s free—
Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!
Weaving in strands from Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, and Colonial-era “captivity narratives,” McLane casts Dickinson as an ironic critic of assent and fear. Her wry observations on the power and attraction of fear–”‘Tis so appalling–it exhilarates”–seem ready-made for today’s world of Code Red warnings and the “ecstasy of alertness.”
Book artist Charles Hobson interpreted Billy Collins’ “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” in a wonderfully inventive way; reading this book requires one to deal with mother-of-pearl buttons with a “light forward pull” and contend with the “hook-and-eye fastener” to get to the pages between the covers.
While you’re visiting Hobson’s site, be sure to look at the other interpretations he offers: of stories and essays by Barry Lopez, poems by Richard Wilbur and Margaret Atwood, paintings and monotypes by Edgar Degas, and Balzac’s thoughts on coffee. They are rich and tactile expressions that merge words and print and paper and images in fascinating ways.
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