spring

Before you thought of spring,
Except as a surmise,
You see, God bless his suddenness,
A fellow in the skies
Of independent hues,
A little weather-worn,
Inspiriting habiliments
Of indigo and brown.

With specimens of song,
As if for you to choose,
Discretion in the interval,
With gay delays he goes
To some superior tree
Without a single leaf,
And shouts for joy to nobody
But his seraphic self!

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

The sun just touched the morning;
The morning, happy thing,
Supposed that he had come to dwell,
And life would be all spring.

She felt herself supremer, –
A raised, ethereal thing;
Henceforth for her what holiday!
Meanwhile, her wheeling king

Trailed slow along the orchards
His haughty, spangled hems,
Leaving a new necessity, –
The want of diadems!

The morning fluttered, staggered,
Felt feebly for her crown, –
Her unanointed forehead
Henceforth her only one.

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

I years had been from home,
And now, before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business, — just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.

I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before.

I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there.

I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.

It’s fascinating to watch artists respond to Dickinson’s work: playwrights, choreographers, letterpress artisans, visual artists, and yurt builders have used Dickinson’s poems as a springboard for their own creativity. Now through November 29, the AIA Gallery in Baltimore presents architectural renderings by Don Cook that use Dickinson’s poems as their foundation (quite literally). According to Deborah McLeod’s review in the Baltimore City Paper, Cook explains:

“Using [Dickinson's] syllabic grid as a floor plan, I assigned upright, load bearing values to the rhyme, alliteration and refrain patterns–and was startled to discover that, from an architectural standpoint, many of her poems were able to support a roof . . . the sketches that grew out of this investigation suggested a High Modernist glass box.”

The sketches are certainly more reminiscent of the Mies van der Rohe house in Barcelona than the Homestead or Evergreens in Amherst. But their clean lines and careful structure draw attention to the architecture inherent in Dickinson’s poems; like the short, spare lines of her verse, Cook’s imaginary houses have not an extra pane or beam to distract from the structure.

You can read more about this work at BmoreArt and Urbanite. And if you’re interested in having one of these poems built, Cook says that he is “interested in the opportunity of building full-scale pavilions based on these translations.”

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.

New feet within my garden go,
New fingers stir the sod;
A troubadour upon the elm
Betrays the solitude.

New children play upon the green,
New weary sleep below;
And still the pensive spring returns,
And still the punctual snow!

The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst has been making good use of their gardens and grounds this spring and summer, with the addition of tours of the homestead’s vernacular lawns and gardens and the formal landscaping of the Evergreens. This coincides nicely with several new publications related to Dickinson’s gardening life, as noted here last month.

Now the museum is sponsoring a series of readings that will bring the poetry out of doors: every Sunday from July 15 to July 29, at 2:00 PM, a poet will read both Dickinson’s work and their own:

• July 15: Poet Cleopatra Mathis, author of White Sea and What to Tip the Boatman.
• July 22: Artist Nancy Ekholm Burkert, illustrator of Acts of Light, a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
• July 29: Poet Dara Wier, author of Remnants of Hannah and Reverse Rapture, named 2006 Book of the Year by Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives.

If you’re in the Amherst area on a Sunday afternoon this July, head to the Dickinson House gardens to hear something old and something new.

Also: if you have a Dickinson event in your area that you’d like mentioned here, leave a comment and I’ll be sure to give it some notice.

Emily Dickinson is now a passenger on the Wilkes-Barrie, PA, bus system, or at least her words are. On Wednesday, the first twelve placards in the Poetry in Transit program were installed:

The 12 poems used for the program are by well-known authors such as Emily Dickinson, William Blake and Robert Frost. For this year, they will use the popular poems that bus riders may recognize from reading in fifth or sixth grade, [Mischelle Anthony, an assistant professor at Wilkes University and the Poetry in Transit coordinator,] said.

Every 30 days, the placards will be switched from bus to bus, and next year 12 new placards will be made.

Which Dickinson poem was selected for the project isn’t indicated in any of the news stories.

This isn’t the first time Dickinson has been spotted on public transportation; the London Transport Poems on the Underground project has included three: “Much madness is divinest sense”, “I taste a liquor never brewed”, and “There came a Wind like a Bugle”. And the State-side Poetry in Motion project has included “Hope is the thing with feathers”, which appeared on buses and trains in New York City and Philadelphia. (Daily Dickinson World Headquarters is located just a few blocks from the Minneapolis LRT, but our Poetry in Motion branch featured some local poets like Louise Erdrich, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Bly, and Bob Dylan.)

When I went to Queen Mary College-London in 1989, I loved the “Poems on the Underground” series and tried to spot them all; I memorized On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer and Spring and Fall shuttling between the South Woodford and Mile End stations. It was much better than staring at the same old ads every morning.

Dickinson’s poems are, I think, uniquely suited for this sort of project: they tend to be short and sharp and surprising, just the thing to snap the weary commuter away from her cell phone or Blackberry for a moment of strange clarity.