fall

Fate slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled — he did not fall –
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes –
He neutralized them all.

She stung him, sapped his firm advance,
But, when her worst was done,
And he, unmoved, regarded her,
Acknowledged him a man.

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Naas Hospital Kildare and other places around the region will have the chance to read a little poetry instead of just out-of-date celebrity rags and old medical journals.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

Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360 rebroadcasts a 2006 piece on Emily Dickinson as part of the show’s American Icons series. Focusing on Dickinson’s The Chariot (a.k.a. “Because I could not stop for Death”), the piece highlights the strange and gnomic characteristics of Dickinson’s poetry, particularly as opposed to the loquacious style of the Fireside Poets.

Interviewed for the show was Belinda West, who portrays Dickinson (among others) for the Vermont Humanities Council, PBS and the History Channel. She wove Dickinson’s words about the perils of publication (“the auction of the Mind of Man”) and the pitfalls of fame into her responses in a natural, witty way.

The “common meter” peril–singing Dickinson to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Gilligan’s Island,” or any number of hymns–is, of course, brought up; but so is the wordplay and subtlety of the poems that Dickinson dressed in such homespun garb. (Or in gossamer gown and tulle tippet; Billy Collins has his say, too, with thoughts on taking off Emily Dickinson’s clothes.)

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.

Another work of performance art inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson is Stevan Novakovich’s dance piece, “Hour of Lead.” This work premiered at California State University – Long Beach in October, 2007. Says the Daily 49er:

In the center of the stage, there was a thick, white wall on which the dancers focused their motions, pressing, twisting and supporting their bodies against its surface. Functioning as the verbal or musical backdrop, the voice of an older woman reciting lines of poetry in which Dickinson explores the nature of pain was projected into the audience.

The title is taken from Dickinson’s “After great pain a formal feeling comes”, a poem we haven’t covered yet at Daily Dickinson.

Though she has a reputation for the ethereal, bolstered no doubt by her spinster reputation and white dress, Dickinson could be a surprisingly physical poet, particularly on the topic of pain. Note, for example, The Mystery of Pain, in which she explores the all-consuming nature of pain: pain has “no future but itself,” consuming everything with its white heat. It is entirely appropriate that Dickinson’s pain poetry should be explored in dance.

If you were coming in the fall,
I’d brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I’d wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.

If only centuries delayed,
I’d count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen’s land.

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I’d toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.

But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time’s uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.

This is one worth looking forward to this Fall:

An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke is scheduled to hit the shelves in September. Brock Clarke is a writer with a distinctive voice–charming and strange and wholly engaging. Carrying the Torch was one of my favorite story collections of the last couple years: nine stories that were funny and sad at the same time, and worth many return visits. There have been rumors about this novel for a couple years now, and I’m very happy to see those rumors come to fruition.

An Arsonist’s Guide is the story of Sam Pulsifer, “the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts”. While in prison for this act, Puslifer receives letters from professors of literature condemning him to hell, from arson enthusiasts, and from people demanding a curtain call:

All of them wanted me to burn down the houses of a variety of dead writers—Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Some of the correspondents wanted me to burn down the homes of writers I’d never even heard of. All of the letter writers were willing to wait for me to get out of prison. And all of them were willing to pay me.

I expect something touching and madcap at the same time–add this one to your reserve list today!

A few items of note from the blogosphere:

• Writing Science Poetry from Students Of Success: Susan Shaw reflects on the uses (and abuses) to which poets have put science over the centuries, from Wordsworth’s excoriations to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sublimity. Dickinson rates a mention–for “Arcturus”–and certainly stands as a solid example of a poet who closely observed and noted the natural world. “Arcturus” seems at first reading to be in the party of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned”, but her take on the apparent demystification to which science puts the natural world is of a more humorous tone than Wordsworth’s strident Romanticism.
• The Dinner Party from ectoplasmosis: John Brownlee reflects on Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”, a piece that consists of place settings “for 39 famous or imaginary women at an enormous triangular banquet table, with each plate specially designed in a vaginal motif symbolic of their personality.” Emily Dickinson’s setting, pictured here, “is a puffy pile of pink lace.” Though given the passion of Wild Nights, I would have expected something with a little more passion.
• Excuses, Excuses from Literary Rejections on Display: in a list including James Joyce, John Knowles, Herman Melville, and Pearl Buck, Dickinson’s poems are rejected thus: “The rhymes are all wrong.” (Which, of course, they are; that’s part of the magic.) A discussion of the wisdom of airing one’s rejections, in what may seem to be a tone of self-righteousness, ensues. I got a rejection myself tonight for a story that’s collecting a lot of interesting comments; in this case, the editor noted that she likes things a little “dark”, but this one was too much on the “nasty” side. An earlier rejection of this story thought it “amusing”, but continued that “I’m afraid that I simply didn’t understand the point of this story.” I like getting a little note on a rejection, and by the time I’ve sent something out it’s so long since the writing (this particular story is almost two years old) that I have trouble mustering much pique. But I can understand (and admire) someone who chooses not to submit, who hoards nearly 2,000 carefully crafted little verses that make the reader “feel physically as if the top of [their] head were taken off.”
• Britney Spears Is The Next Emily Dickinson from Celebrity Watch (and oh so very many others…): another namecheck (maybe even more unfortunate than the one from Oxford County’s Labor Day killer) has Britney Spears’ poison poem to her mother resonating with Emily Dickinson. One suspects that this is because the only woman poet the blogosphere could think of on such short notice was Dickinson; here’s hoping these fall out of the Google index quickly enough…