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In her show at the Derek Eller Gallery in New York, sculptor Jessica Jackson Hutchins shows some Dickinsonian roots: The Exponent of Earth (You Make Me), with a title taken from Dickinson (and Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation” punk record; she’s married to former Pavement member Stephen Malkmus, and apparently used the Dickinson poem in their wedding vows).
According to the ArtCal review, Hutchinson’s work “embodies a sense of both the monumental and the intimate and personal”; sample pieces from the show can be seen on the gallery’s site, including intriguing works like “Relics from a Lonely Dinner Party,” “Conversation betweenThings,” and “All the Holes in the Moon.” There’s a stark roughness to these pieces, but also a hint of fragility. Certainly worth a visit if you’re in the neighborhood.
Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—
Tags: death, die, Life, Love, men, moon, poem, sea, see, star
MinnPost’s David Hawley has more information about Friday’s Dickinson marathon at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, which starts at 8 AM at Frey Library. According to Prof. Erika Scheurer, who organized the event, this Dickinson reading is more populist than most: instead of a stage, there are groupings of comfortable chairs; and spectators are encouraged to pick up the thread as the poems roll along.
In addition to the reading, there will be a continuous viewing of the Julie Harris “Belle of Amherst” film, and a chance to “Create Your Own Dickinson Poem” from cut-up lines (Dickinson meets William S. Burroughs?). And if 8 PM comes around and poem 1,789 hasn’t been read yet, the event decamps to Koch Commons until midnight.
Tags: bee, night, poem, star
In case you were, like I was, shepherding Cub Scouts around on Saturday and missed the Prairie Home Companion broadcast, here’s a link to the Guy Noir send-up of Emily Dickinson. As expected, it’s pretty good. If you like that kind of thing. Which not everyone does.
(SHE SINGS) (TO “EVERYTHING’S COMING UP ROSES”)
I stay home. Every night.
I go around dressed in white!
I write poems — secretly—
And tonight I will get out of Amherst!
Bring my horse!! Bring a mask—
I’m not going to tell so don’t ask—
I am thrilled — goodness me—
I am going to meet Henry at Walden.
Tags: april, night, poem, rose, sing
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!
Tags: april, august, bee, bird, book, books, buzz, death, dying, fly, hope, Life, men, month, music, night, poem, see, sing, spring, star, summer, thought
By the end of the week Emily began to be sighted outside her room, a mysterious and elusive figure fleeting as a woodland creature no sooner glimpsed than it has vanished.
“EDickionson RepliLuxe” by Joyce Carol Oates, from Wild Nights!
In “EDickinsonRepliLuxe”, Joyce Carol Oates offers a science fiction fable about Emily Dickinson–or, rather, a stunted facsimile of the Belle of Amherst–come to live with a modern suburban couple. Sold by RepliLuxe, Inc., the “child-sized Emily . . . wearing tiny buckled shoes” was supposed to “enrich, enhance, ‘double in value’ one’s life,” but instead becomes a disturbing and disruptive presence in their house. Both husband and wife seek to “own” Dickinson–the wife through an appeal to sisterly and poetic urges, the husband through brute force–but in the end, it is the Dickinson automaton who possesses herself.
I’ll admit that I’m not always an Oates fan; while I recognize that she has made an interesting marriage of realism and the Gothic, I find that her stories are often overwrought and predictable. But this story, though not terribly surprising in plot, is more subdued than I had expected; perhaps the gnomic Dickinson has a calming effect. The story is told in the broad strokes of a fairy tale, with the Dickinson mannequin a more deeply realized character than the husband and wife, but the sketchiness works where a more detailed treatment would not, hinting and suggesting with an economy of language much like Dickinson’s poems.
“EDickinsonRepliLuxe” is on of five stories in Oates’ new collection, Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. The subtitle is a bit misleading: the Dickinson story takes place more than a century after her “last days,” and the Poe story is a Gothic fantasia on Poe’s life-after-death, or perhaps an alternate history in which he lives on; though the other stories do imagine their subjects’ last hours in intriguing ways. This is certainly a collection that will appeal to the English (or American Studies) major, full of allusion and pastiche. Indeed, it may be a bit much of that, a little too flattering to the students who paid attention in that survey of American literature class. But sometimes it’s nice to be flattered for knowing about Poe, Dickinson, et al, when one is out of touch with “Survivor” and “American Idol.”
Tags: days, death, die, fair, house, ice, joy, land, Life, marriage, may, men, night, poem, see, sing, touch
Astute readers of this site will have noticed a new feature: audio versions of the poems can be played by clicking the little arrow icon, or downloaded in MP3 format with the “Audio MP3″ link.
Like much else on this site (indeed, like the genesis of the site itself), this new feature has as much to do with me playing with a technology toy as anything else. For a couple years now, I’ve been listening pretty widely to podcasts–from the wonderful Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Minnesota Public Radio shows, to Escape Pod and Pseudopod, to little gems like Miette’s Bedtime Stories and DicksnJanes. Eventually one starts to think one ought to try one’s hand at it.
If you’re an iTunes user, you can subscribe at this URL; if you use another podcast aggregator, paste this RSS feed URL into your subscriptions.
I make no apologies for the quality of these recordings; if you’re brave enough to listen, you’ll be hearing me fumbling around with getting things right–the recordings will probably improve, and if you have suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
The music is from Magnatune, a record label that is incredibly generous in its licensing for non-commercial podcasts. They offer a wide range of classical, folk, New Age, and ambient music; if you like what you hear, why not make a purchase or two? I’ve been particularly struck by the music of Ehren Starks and Claire Fitch.
And if you’re interested in contributing a recording of yourself interpreting a Dickinson poem, I’m all for it–leave a comment and I’ll provide you the details on where to send it. You can get a sense of the publishing schedule by looking at the Gutenberg Project complete poems: we’re closing out series two over the next couple weeks, and will start series three shortly. I typically have things queued up a week or two in advance, but I’d gladly replace one of my interpretations with a reader/listener’s version.
Tags: bee, ice, men, music, poem, sing, star, think, year
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.
Tags: august, away, dare, die, fall, house, may, men, music, night, noon, poem, sea, see, sing, soul, star, year
Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program presents several Dickinson-inspired events this winter:
Soul at White Heat
January 30, 7:00 PM, Dinkelspiel Auditoreum
Dramatic readings of Dickinson’s poems and letters performed by Word for Word and other theater groups, 19th-century music performed on period instruments, and a lively conversation among Dickinson scholars.
The Music Emily Heard
February 13, 7:30 PM, Campbell Recital Hall, Braun Music Center
An evening of parlor music, hymns, and popular song recreates the musical landscape of Dickinson’s time and place. David Giovacchini and ensemble will perform.
The Ghoul of Amherst
March 12, 7:00 pm, Roble Studio Theater
JoAnne Winter of Word for Word will perform Amy Freed’s “The Ghoul of Amherst”, described as “a short, comic vignette set during Emily’s death bed visit to a dying school chum. It addresses with admiration and humor Miss Dickinson’s more grisly preoccupations with the mysteries of the grave.” (This one sounds like particular fun; anyone who has been following along with the mostly-daily poems can’t help but notice that there’s a striking mixture of humor and horror in Dickinson’s meditations on mortality. We here at Daily Dickinson will be doing a little research on Ms. Freed’s work.)
If you’re in the Bay Area this winter, these look like a great way to spend some evenings; they’re all free and open to the public. Any Daily Dickinson readers who attend can drop us a line and give us a review.
Tags: bee, death, die, drop, dying, february, grave, ice, land, Life, march, men, music, poem, sea, song, soul, winter
