Since I’ve spent hours this week soaking up all the Emily Dickinson spirit I can absorb, it’s time to see if I can let some of that experience overflow here today. Maybe someday I’ll count which poets’ words I’ve used the most in the Parlando Project, but since this is an ongoing thing we’d only see the on-going horserace. Still, I suspect Emily Dickinson would be at or near the top — and that’s even though I at first sorta-kinda avoided using Emily Dickinson poems.

It was decades ago when an American Literature professor H. R. Stoneback remarked to me that you could sing most of Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”  Others may recall the same being said but “Amazing Grace”  or “The Theme to Gilligan’s Island”   being called for the tune. The point is that singing Emily Dickinson has been done, and I wanted to seek out new combinations of words and various music.

But Emily waited for me, eventually showed me the variety of her rhythms, and well, once you’ve entered the mind-space of Dickinson you may just want to wander around a bit. So here’s a sample of what we do, seven of the Emily Dickinson poems I’m recalling that I’ve combined with original music today —  and as a bonus, three others that are directly Emily Dickinson connected, but more obscure. After all, the Parlando Project does Poetry’s Greatest Hits, but we like the deep cuts too. The bold faced headings below are links to the earlier posts when we presented the piece where you can read more about my encounter with the poems

“We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.”    I enjoyed expanding on both the undercurrent of dread and then the Three Stooges level tree-bonk in this one. Earlier this year for National Poetry Month I created a video for this classic performance, and that’s linked in the post you can reach with the bold-faced heading/link. I’ve always thought this one of my most successful pieces.

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“May Flower.”   I sometimes catch in Dickinson’s Transcendentalism a whiff of 1960’s Psychedelia, so I went with a Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd feel for this setting. Writer Sherman Alexie earlier this year wondered what an Emily Dickinson cover band would be like. I sent him a link to this. His response? “Oh, wow, I was making a little joke about rock star Emily and here you’ve been making it real. That little beauty has a Zeppelin/13th Floor Elevators vibe. Way cool!”  The bold heading above will give you  another National Poetry Month poetry “lyric video” for this which also tries to tie Emily’s “Sixties” with “The Sixties” of our last century.

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“It sifts from leaden sieves.”   I love this poem of snow sifting in a field’s stubble, and in the original post I posit it could be Emily looking out her famous bedroom window at the farm field that was once across the road from the Dickinson Homestead.

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“Soul Selector Blues”  (my adaptation of “A Soul Selects Her Own Society”)  I have converted several literary poems into the Afro-American Blues song form. For this one I even tried to degrade the recording’s sound to that of a worn 78 RPM record. My goal here? Once you’ve heard this Dickinson poem as if it was a tune for a classic blues-woman singing her self-determination, you’ll never read it on the page the same way again.  “Close the valves of my attention. Like a stone!”

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“Answer July.”  Instead of borrowing from American Blues, this one has a sitar part. Not authentic South-Asian sitar, or so I’ll plead in terms of cultural appropriation — more like Alex Chilton and the Box Tops “Cry Like a Baby.”  In the original post I mention my recent pet theory that Emily Dickinson may have picked up legal concepts and lingo from the lawyers in her family, and in this poem she seems to be humorously applying courtroom situations to the seasons.

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“Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower.”    Some of my pieces have used orchestral instruments, but some are just solo acoustic guitar. This one is more the latter.

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“This Word Is Not Conclusion.”   A good one to end a list or collection.

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The Tell It Slant Festival is increasing my Emily Dickinson Experience this week.

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And then here are those three connected poets I promised.

A poem by Susan Gilbert Dickinson, the sister-in-law, neighbor, and frequently proposed lover of Emily Dickinson, “Crushed Before the Moth.”   I still have much to learn about her, but when I visited the Emily Dickinson Museum a few years back, the part of the tour into the next-door home of Susan and Emily’s brother Austin surprised me with it’s impact. Whatever the details of their relationship, we know Susan was intimate with Emily’s poetry, so it’s interesting to see what her verse is like.

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a remarkable man who Dickinson sought out for feedback on her poems, and who was one of the initial posthumous editors of her verse. This project has led me to learn more about Higginson, who’s often played as a version of “the record-label man who refused to sign the Beatles.”  I found that he’s much more than that, though I don’t know much about this poem which may have been a youthful composition. The poem is called and is about “June.”

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And finally, another too easily dismissed classmate of Dickinson who wanted to and finally managed to publish Emily Dickinson while she was alive, Helen Hunt Jackson. Did you know Jackson was a early campaigner for American Indigenous rights?  That’s a long story, but here’s Jackson’s short poem “Poppies on the Wheat.”

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