Today’s piece for National Poetry Month is another Emily Dickinson: her gothic aubade “Ample make this Bed.” Word-music is subjective, but I find this one of the most poignant and lovely of her poems. As with many Dickinson poems the meaning tantalizes, at once clear on the surface and tangled beneath. The trope it’s using, … Continue reading Emily Dickinson’s “Ample make this Bed”
I’ve just spent much of a day with Emily Dickinson. I’ll tell you it was enjoyable, not the least because there is a factor in many of her poems: they grow when you spend time with them. It started late last night. I noted that I had been looking at early examples of “jazz poetry,” … Continue reading Musicians Wrestle Everywhere — Emily Dickinson hears songs as they are created
Today Emily Dickinson is going to show us how not to write a poem—and how to make it work anyway. This piece combines two different poems she wrote: “Forever—is composed of Nows” and “Crumbling is not an instant’s Act” in a way that I hope lets each poem reflect on each other. Both speak about … Continue reading Emily Dickinson: Forever and Crumbling
I woke up this morning to learn that it’s Emily Dickinson’s birthday—and I didn’t get her anything. Well, we do know how to do something here at the Parlando Project and that’s create musical presentations quickly, and it’s not like we’ve run out of Dickinson poems to use. So today’s piece is a Dickinson poem … Continue reading Emily Dickinson’s Snow
Did you know that Emily Dickinson wrote a Thanksgiving poem? It’s not one of her “Greatest Hits” or anything, but it does represent a couple of Dickinsonian traits: skeptical humor and puzzling philosophical concision. You can read the text of it here as I discuss my encounter with it. Dickinson didn’t use titles, and the … Continue reading One day there is of the series: Emily Dickinson’s Thanksgiving, sort of
I’ve mentioned in passing that I was reading Genevieve Taggard’s 1930 The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson this spring. The busy schedule of this project, and life in general, slowed my reading-rate, but I thought I’d share a few brief thoughts about it after I finished it. Once I read about this book, I … Continue reading The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson by Genevieve Taggard
I once thought that one of the marvels of Emily Dickinson is that she was able to create such revolutionary poetry without any supporting circle of fellow writers. She had poetic heroes: Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but she never met them. Well, it turns out there’s a bit more to her story. Last … Continue reading Poppies on the Wheat. Before 1890 the most famous woman writer from Amherst wasn’t Emily Dickinson.
Here’s someone that notes that the sublime Randall Munroe of ekcd.com had some fun with Emily Dickinson. Her post also reminds us of the Gilligan’s Island theme connection. I do like that Munroe has fun with the possibility that Emily was a bit of bad-ass, which the poetry says she was. This video has … Continue reading Bonus Emily Dickinson links
Yesterday I said poetry isn’t just beauty and wonder. Well, sometimes it is. Like this recasting of an Emily Dickinson poem into outright 1960’s wonderment. I carried around a copy of the original text of “May-Flower” today for Poem in Your Pocket Day, but alas I wasn’t assertive about it. Should I have been? The … Continue reading See Emily (Dickinson) Play — I recast her poem “May-Flower” for National Poetry Month
If I didn’t read the news, it would still be spring. I’ve mentioned it’s been hard to produce new pieces here recently. While there’s a variety of reasons for this, here’s one: I’d planned a little series on May flowers. I was inspired by my wife’s love for our native northland wildflowers and some gorgeous … Continue reading Dickinson’s “Bloom”
Frank Hudson 