A daily poem from the complete works of Emily Dickinson.
You are currently browsing articles tagged books.
Dickinson fans in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, should note Tuesday, December 18th, on their calendars: the Mead Public Library’s Great Books Club will be discussing the poetry of Emily Dickinson at 6:30 p.m.
The official Daily Dickinson 2008 Calendar is available, featuring poems and pictures that have been featured on this site.
Daily Dickinson fans who find themselves in Sag Harbor, NY, today should make a point of dropping by Canio’s Books, 290 Main St., between 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM, for free tea and gingerbread. And while you’re there, be sure to browse the “[s]helves … crammed with books worth reading” and pester their “knowledgeable staff … eager to make recommendations.”
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.
Tags: book, books, die, house, ice, Life, Love, men, noon, ship, sing, song, star, year
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!
Tags: bee, book, books, care, death, eyes, fear, joy, Life, Love, men, poem, see, ship, sing, think, winter, year
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.
Tags: bee, book, books, fair, first, ice, land, may, men, poem
I come from an ancient time when the first day of school brought a notebook (the kind made of cardstock, not the kind that boots up and makes you look very with-it at the coffee shop) full of syllabi fresh off the mimeograph machine. If you were lucky, your instructor was the absent-minded sort, and asked the secretary in the humanities office to run off a fresh batch just minutes before he dragged his rumpled self up to the front of the classroom. These fresh syllabi were still warm, still damp, and carried that intoxicating smell of purple ink settling into the curled paper. Oh such, such were the joys . . .
Now, of course, that syllabus is on-line, hooked-in, RSS-enabled, and attached to a rolicking class blog. The cool kids don’t print the syllabus–it’s already on their Blackberries and iPhones; they Twitter the syllabus instead (because blogging is so 2005 . . .). They deal in clean bits and bytes, not blurry paper that leaves blue stains on your fingertips.
Here’s a sampling of the syllabi available on-line that show that cool as kids are, they still have to do a little time with the Belle of Amherst; if you have a mimeograph machine humming in your basement and would like to spin out a few, go right ahead . . .
I’m suddenly in the mood to buy fresh blue books, #2 pencils, and a batch of college-rule spiral notebooks.
This story isn’t about Emily Dickinson the poet, but rather about Emily Dickinson the six-toed cat.
The descendants of Ernest Hemingway’s six-toed cat have been granted a reprieve. Since Hemingway’s death, his Key West, Florida, residence has been a museum, and the cats–about 60, according to the Hemingway Home cat page–have had the run of the place. The USDA ruled last year that the cats “must be caged or evicted, because they were ‘performing animals’ at the town’s most popular paid-for tourist attraction.” The museum begs to differ: the cats may be a popular draw, but they hardly perform (cats being not much for the performing arts, after all).
The Key West city council has weighed in with an exemption for the cats:
The cats reside on the property just as [they] did in the time of Hemingway himself.
They are not on exhibition in the manner of circus animals. The city commission finds that the family of polydactyl Hemingway cats are indeed animals of historic, social and tourism significance … an integral part of the history and ambiance of the Hemingway House.
About half the cats inherited the extra-toes trait from that early ship’s captain’s gift to Hemingway, and most bear literary names. The museum web site displays pictures of Simone De Beauvoir, Archibald MacLeish, and, of course, Emily Dickinson, a “healthy cat with dilute calico fur.”
The polydactyl trait, according to lore, was bred into New England cats because sailors considered extra-toed cats lucky. Whether any seafaring branch of the Key West clan made it as far inland as Amherst is unclear.
Tags: bee, book, books, death, house, land, may, must, sea, ship, year
