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
Let’s begin our celebration of Halloween here at the Parlando Project with a setting of a short poem by Emily Bronte that starts “The night is darkening round me.” What a marvelous short poem it is too. Halloween here in the northland of Minnesota is in some years an early winter holiday, and this late … Continue reading Emily Bronte’s Spellbound
It’s time to wrap up our National Poetry Month celebration, and once more I’m going to present a piece where I wrote the words as well as the music, a piece in celebration of the unpredictability of poetic genius. In the “Song of Myself” section I presented a few days back, Whitman proclaims that America … Continue reading Confucian Ode on Blake, Dickinson, and Whitman
I sometimes wonder if I overstress the mysterious, even mystical, element in Emily Dickinson. Perhaps I’m overcorrecting for the too-limiting image of the charming eccentric writer of little poems that was her package-label when I first learned of her in the middle of the last century. I’ve since wanted to put the small print somewhere … Continue reading Dickinson’s Autumn
The great thing about Emily Dickinson and her around 2000 poems is that there’s always one you haven’t experienced yet—and just this week over at the Interesting Literature blog I saw this Dickinson spring poem. “May-Flower” has Dickinson doing her most subtle music to accompany her most Blakean attention. Just like it says itself: it’s … Continue reading See Emily Play: May-Flower
