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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Naas Hospital Kildare and other places around the region will have the chance to read a little poetry instead of just out-of-date celebrity rags and old medical journals.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.”