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.

A few Dickinson news items have drawn our attention, and might warrant yours:

• Guy Noir sings Emily Dickinson?: the Amherst Bulletin notes that Emily Dickinson was the butt of an extended joke on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion last week, with the erstwhile P.I. Guy Noir auditioning for a role in “Stop for Death,” a Dickinson musical. Of course, this is the same Keillor whose latest CD is called “English Majors” and who holds sonnet contests, so I’m sure the joke was in good fun (Cub Scout activities kept me from hearing the show myself, alas). I seem to remember an amusing riff a few months ago that involved Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and wood ticks; Keillor is certainly one to monitor . . .
• Dickinson Marathon in St. Paul: another story with a Minnesota connection: St. Thomas University will hold a Dickinson marathon on April 25, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, in the O’Shaughnessy Room of O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center. “The goal: To read aloud all of Dickinson’s poems — from #1 to #1,789 — between 8 a.m. and midnight. Readers can come and go as they please; stay for a half-hour or make a day of it. Participants will sit in a circle and take turns reading; listeners are welcome too.” Common Good Books–Garrison Keillor’s bookstore–has provided copies of Franklin’s edition of Dickinson; this seems like a conspiracy . . .
• Wild Nights! reviews are all around us this Spring: the Minneapolis Star Tribune weighs in (will these Minnesotans not leave poor Dickinson be?), as does the New York Times Book Review. According to the Book Review’s podcast, the NYT reviewer Brenda Wineapple has a book about Dickinson and Higginson hitting the shelves this August.
• A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey is the next Dickinson-related book to watch: a fascinating look into the intersections of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Martin Johnson Heade, a naturalist and artist who specialized in hummingbirds, a creature which frequently inhabits Dickinson’s poems.
• Fleda Brown discusses “I heard a fly buzz” in her ongoing series for National Poetry Month (and you thought April was just about fools and taxes . . .)
• Finally, we hope that the “Daily” aspect of “Daily Dickinson” will return this week, with several non-poetic things coming under control here at DailyDickionson World Headquarters; stay tuned!

On August 13th (plenty of time to get your tickets!), the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California, will premier a new opera by Lesley Dill, Divide Light. The opera is “an interdisciplinary collaboration between New York visual and performance artist Lesley Dill and Colorado composer and conductor Tom Morgan” inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Of the many interpretations of Dickinson that we’ve noted over the last year–like Helen Noonan’s Lieder-Opera, a sing-along with Seattle’s Choral Arts, and Don Cook’s architectural take on Dickinson’s poems’ structures–this one sounds the strangest and possibly most wonderful of all. A multi-media opera, “Divide Light” combines music and words and movement in illuminating and beguiling ways:

In Divide Light, Dill redirects the classic form of opera to a sparer and more closely developed theatrical presentation. The haunting visual element will feature large projections on a back screen and multiple scrims. The images will be a combination of Dill’s stark, edgy and evocative black-and-white photographs and projected text from Dickinson’s poetry. Poems will stream, scroll, flash, swirl, twirl, pop out, edge in, seep out, fade in, fall down, and rise up on the screen and scrims. The performers will sing Dickinson’s words and wear them scrawled across their costumes. Poems will appear in unusual places throughout the opera, interacting with the audience in unexpected ways.

You can sample some of the music and images at the Divide Light web site. The music is haunting and a little troubling, particularly the repetitive and layered “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” and the subtle “I Am Afraid”. The video is a little more difficult to follow, since it’s disconnected from the context of the stage. All the same, the combination of images and music is affecting. Pictures of the costumes–stark and simple, black and white, covered with letters–give some indication of how the pieces will weave together.

I suspect that “Divide Light” won’t be to everyone’s taste: sensitive souls may come away with a few weeks’ worth of troubling dreams, if not outright nightmares. But it has every hint of providing a rich and provocative look into Dickinson’s poems and its place in the dark spaces of the mind.

Farther in summer than the birds,
Pathetic from the grass,
A minor nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive mass.

No ordinance is seen,
So gradual the grace,
A pensive custom it becomes,
Enlarging loneliness.

Antiquest felt at noon
When August, burning low,
Calls forth this spectral canticle,
Repose to typify.

Remit as yet no grace,
No furrow on the glow,
Yet a druidic difference
Enhances nature now.

In lands I never saw, they say,
Immortal Alps look down,
Whose bonnets touch the firmament,
Whose sandals touch the town, –

Meek at whose everlasting feet
A myriad daisies play.
Which, sir, are you, and which am I,
Upon an August day?

The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.

On December 10th, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, celebrates Dickinson’s 177th birthday with a reading and discussion hosted by Richard Howard, poetry editor of the Paris Review and winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for “Untitled Subjects”.

In addition to readings of Dickinson’s work and the discussion of Dickinson’s phenomenal output of 1862–more than 200 poems were produced that year (see Emily Dickinson Revisited: A Study of Periodicity in Her Work by John F. McDermott, M.D. for some interesting charts and graphs…)–the Folger will serve black cake made according to Dickinson’s recipe (more on the pounds of fruit and pints of brandy required here).

Now would be a good time, too, to note that Emily Dickinson: The Poet Lights the Lamp, a one-woman play written and performed by Yvonne Hudson, will be staged at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, on December 5. It’s a grand old time for Dickinson in Foggy Bottom this winter!

Yvonne Hudson’s The Poet Lights the Lamp that had been scheduled for the University of Pittsburgh last weekend had to be cancelled.

However, the compilation will be presented in Washington, DC, for Emily’s birthday on Wednesday, December 5, 2007, at St. Augustine’s Lutheran Church, a co-presentation of Southeastern University and the monthly St. Augustine’s “Art and the Spirit” program.

Write New.Place.Collaborations@gmail.com for details on booking or attending this program and Yvonne Hudson’s presentations of ‘The Belle of Amherst,’ performed in Pittsburgh in 2006 for the 30th anniversary of William Luce’s play.

Lindsay Crouse is the latest to try her hand at playing Emily Dickinson in William Luce’s one-woman play, “The Belle of Amherst”. It’s a witty and subtle play that brings Dickinson to life as someone much richer and well-rounded than the shy, cloistered spinstress role she so often plays in the popular imagination.

“The Belle of Amherst” plays the Gloucester Stage from July 19 to August 12. It alternates with “Dear Liar”, based on the correspondence between G.B. Shaw and actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell.

Those unable to get to Gloucester this summer might be able to chase down Julie Harris’ 1976 turn as Emily on DVD. In interviews, Ms. Crouse has cited this performance, which she saw on Broadway (her father Richard Crouse was part of the team that wrote “The Sound of Music”, so she’s been around theaters a long time), as an inspiration.

Have you got a brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink,
And shadows tremble so?

And nobody knows, so still it flows,
That any brook is there;
And yet your little draught of life
Is daily drunken there.

Then look out for the little brook in March,
When the rivers overflow,
And the snows come hurrying from the hills,
And the bridges often go.

And later, in August it may be,
When the meadows parching lie,
Beware, lest this little brook of life
Some burning noon go dry!

Armed with a colorimeter, Spencer Finch recorded the quality of color and light in Emily Dickinson’s garden on August 28, 2004. Using this data, he built a cloud out of crumpled plastic and a light panel that recreates the color and light he recorded. The piece, currently on display at the Massachussetts Museum of Contemporary Art, is called “Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).” (See this New York Times article for a good picture of the work.)

Another interesting, and certainly tangentially related, installation a representation of the breeze that blew off Walden Pond one March afternoon in 2007. It’s achieved with an array of fans mounted in columns and controlled by a computer, switching them off and on to reproduce the speed and direction of that wind from the past.

Finch plays with light and color, and occasionally other senses, to reproduce pieces of memory. Some of his pieces, like “Eos” and the Dickinson cloud, toy with literature and history; others are more mundane: they recreate the light in a hotel room, for example, or the color of the sky over Coney Island. They are playful and strange in their mix of exact measurement and poetics; Ken Johnson captures the sense of these pieces well in his Boston Globe review:

It helps to imagine Finch as a kind of nutty scientist played by Christopher Lloyd trying to distill and exactly measure the essence of poetry.

What is one to make of Finch’s projects? I’m certainly no art critic, so my opinion comes completely uninformed. But what strikes me as interesting about it is how radically decontextualized it is. Homer describes the “rosy-fingered dawn” above Troy, and Finch reproduces the exact spectrum of colors that comprise those rosy fingers with flourescent tubes. Has he distilled the essence of Homer’s poetry, or has he made even more clear how incredibly contingent poetry, and memory, and experience, really are?

I’m sometimes disappointed by the photographs that I bring back from an event; they’re so often flat and inexpressive, at least compared to the experience that they were meant to record. No camera is able to record the complex web of sensation, emotion, and memory that comprise an experience: the film may accurately record the spectrum of reflected light that fell on it while the shutter was open, but it cannot record the sounds and smells and tastes and feelings and fears and joys. The mind may record some of it, and a poet’s words might be able to communicate parts of it, but there is always that essential part that is somehow inexpressible. Finch expresses the expressible in minute detail, leaving us to grasp for what is left out.

See more fascinating Finch pieces at his web site, Spencer Finch (.com).