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From Melbourne, Australia, comes word of another artistic interpretation of Emily Dickinson, this time soprano Helen Noonan’s “lieder-opera” Voicing Emily. According to The Age:

Voicing Emily explores various aspects of her life and times, including the impact of the American civil war. . . . The work also explores the two loves of the poet’s life — her sister-in-law, Susan, and a newspaper editor, Samuel Bowles. Both relationships were unconsummated and Noonan speculates that consummation might have brought closure to the infinite possibilities that Dickinson saw.

Three sopranos perform Dickinson at various ages: Noonan is joined by Theresa Borg and Caitlin Fowler. The songs that make up the piece were commissioned from three composers, including Eddie Perfect, better known for his satirical political songs.

Australia is quite a hotbed of Dickinsonian efforts; the Dickinson Periodicals Project, based at Macquarie University, was started in 1993 to “study the religious, philosophical and social debates that were represented in Emily Dickinson’s periodical reading”; and Mark Ragg’s The Dickinson Papers was published last year by Random House Australia to much acclaim. Dickinson once referred to herself as “the only Kangaroo among the Beauty”, notes the Dickinson Periodicals Project, so perhaps there’s some deep tie to Oz that makes her so well-loved down under.

Jeanette Winterson (herself a bit of a celebrity) writes in the Times Online of the conflict between celebrity and creativity. She imagines an “American Idol”-style competition for young writers, and suggests that the successful competitor “should be good-looking, funny, talkative, personable, the right shape for an Armani suit, and a bit of a psychopath.”

Some writers would probably have thrived in this setting; Winterson suggests that Byron, Dickens, and Gertrude Stein would have found something to like in the arrangement (and I’d add Twain, I think, and probably Emerson). Others, like Wordsworth, “would have had a nervous breakdown or gone to join D.H.Lawrence in Mexico.” As ever, Dickinson is mentioned in passing as the shorthand example for shyness.

But there’s quite a bit more to Dickinson’s relationship to fame (or, as it has devolved over the last 121 years since her death, mere notoriety) than simple shyness. It wasn’t that she feared attention or hid from the world; fame was a game that she chose not to play. In I’m nobody, she used her deft humor to mock those who are driven by fame:

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog

There’s a “Don’t give up!” list circulating around the blogosphere (you can see it here, here, and here, for example) that includes the observation that “Emily Dickinson had only seven poems published in her lifetime.” What this list fails to note, of course, is that publishing her poems seems not to have been a very high priority for Dickinson; it was the writing of them, not the publishing of them, that mattered. She was none too keen on having them see the light of day. Rather than a model for the unpublished writer striving to break into print, Dickinson is an example of the amateur who does what she loves for no reward but joy. How dreadfully out of step!

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.

Not in this world to see his face
Sounds long, until I read the place
Where this is said to be
But just the primer to a life
Unopened, rare, upon the shelf,
Clasped yet to him and me.

And yet, my primer suits me so
I would not choose a book to know
Than that, be sweeter wise;
Might some one else so learned be,
And leave me just my A B C,
Himself could have the skies.

By way of stylehive, here’s some Dickinsonian letterpress eye candy from pearlmarmalade: A Startling Life, Letterpress.

This particular peice, alas, is sold out; but there are some other nice pieces at the Pearl & Marmalade gallery. This is a press to watch.

We’ve already mentioned here the MASS MoCA show of Spencer Finch’s strangely experiential installations, but since DailyDickinson.com World Headquarters is located just south of Lake Street in Minneapolis (we hope this show graces the Walker someday…), we haven’t actually visited it. But Maria Williams-Russell at Minds Island has a nice review of the show, and it only makes us want to see (and feel and hear) it that much more:

Finch puts the observer at the center of the experience in which each piece explores the idea of human perception by attempting to recreate, through scientific methods, how people remember, experience, and represent the visual and sensory phenomenon that occur in everyday experience. . . . What makes this poetic is that Finch has chosen subjects that are elusive in nature: weather, dreams, stars, memory, sight, thought processes, and other equally mysterious phenomenon, which elicit an instantaneous emotional response.

If you go, Maria notes, be sure to grab the show’s booklet: “Without it, you will wander aimlessly not knowing why the art is the way it is.”

And, if a brief Google-stalking isn’t misleading me, it turns out Maria has a way with words poetical herself; see dissemination and sticks and feathers at the Pitkin Review, and (untitled) at Quay.

In its review of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane, Scientific American Magazine asks, “Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today?”

Lane’s thesis is that the DSM, psychiatry’s handbook, was re-written in the 1980s with an eye toward pathologizing emotion, largely at the behest of pharmaceutical companies that stood to gain from the prescriptions for shyness, compulsion, and bad attitudes that could be written under the guise of new clinical disorders. And it certainly does seem that the dys-pharma-topia predicted in Brave New World, when a few well-designed pills can smooth out the rough edges of personality and temper the storms of emotion.

Dickinson is a handy touchstone of shyness, though perhaps she wasn’t quite the recluse we want to imagine. She was, after all, well known in Amherst as a knowledgeable botanist and master gardener, which implies that she rubbed a few shoulders. And she carried on lively correspondences with many people; though a shy person might hide behind pens and stationery, Dickinson’s letters display an openness and humor that are far from bashful.

The most telling observation comes, perhaps, from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson’s editor: on first meeting her, he observed, “she talked soon & thenceforward continuously . . . sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her — but readily recommencing.” Introverted, perhaps; protective of her poetry, certainly; but simply shy?

In any case, though, paroxetine would certainly have changed things, probably not for the better . . .

Imagine my surprise when I noticed a sudden surge in traffic to this site (“sudden” and “surge” are relative terms here . . .), especially since things have been less than daily here of late (State Fair, first day of school, the usual excuses). And my greater surprise yet to find that the surge was courtesy of a Literature for Kossacks post at the Daily Kos.

And a great article it is, too. It highlights some of the things that make Dickinson much more interesting than if she were just a spinster writing rhymes in a New England attic: her playfulness with words and ideas, her earthy mysticism, her–quoting Harold Bloom–”cognitive originality as absolute as William Blake’s.” Dickinson certainly does rub elbows with Blake, as well as with Rumi, Rilke, Yeats, and Bly.

Full (or partial?) disclosure on the political side: I’m a not-particularly-partisan type, having wandered all over the political spectrum for quite a while. I’d describe myself as a “Tory anarchist” if asked, stealing proudly from George Orwell: I am distrustful of privilege and power, whether political or economic, but I’m also wary of Big Plans and Grand Schemes. If pressed, I’d mumble some things about subsidiarity, the Quaker testimony of equality, and communitarianism, hoping to confuse matters. I’m a great admirer of folks like Dorothy Day and Pyotr Kropotkin, but also of Karl Popper and Hernando De Soto (the economist, not the conquistador; I’m most decidedly unimpressed with conquistadors).

In the two decades I’ve been voting, I’ve cast ballots for folks in both major parties and more than a few minor ones as well, based on how well I expected them to respect individual liberty while recognizing the common good. Lately that has meant voting Democratic, though often because the Democrat was far less bad than the alternative. This time around, I’m looking for the presidential candidate who, as Thomas Ricks suggests, has the best developed sense of tragedy. (That may have to be Obama, by default, as the only published poet in the bunch.)

So anyway–though I’m hardly an upstanding member of any party but George Orwell’s (I suppose that’s the ill-fated and marginal POUM, which sounds almost like “POEM” though it ends far worse than the usual enjambment . . .), I’m greatly appreciative of the link, and impressed with a fine piece of writing on Emily Dickinson.