Book Geek Vacation Day

I'm taking a road trip on Friday to visit the Emily Dickinson Museum at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. In preparation (aren't my vacations rather geeky?!) I have been reading two new books I was thrilled to acquire. One is a biography, discussed on NPR with the author in the following link. It looks like it isn't going to be a particularly enthralling read. The other I think, is. I started it last night and by page forty had been completely seduced by the author Jerome Charyn.  His premise is brilliant, and it looks like so too is his execution. A novel called The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. I'd like to write more for you now - tell you what I have and have not accomplished, but I want to go read my new book... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1133921

Monday Morning Emilyzing

      Looks like I'm going to share most of the Emily Dickinson information that I am studying myself these days. Can't seem to help myself. I don't know if she is making the news more lately or if she is just making my radar more lately because of my renewed interest in her work. It would be hard to believe that she was always the subject of so much current discussion. Either way it is a wonderful legacy for a poet. I find it quite remarkable. In the link I share below she is being discussed by her current predecessor in popularity, Billy Collins.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128272101
     I have had a couple of new developments with my own poetry in the last couple of days; I had my first paid poetry reading which was very rewarding to do, even though the crowd was not really a crowd. I also entered into an agreement with artist Frannie Schwabb to exhibit an ekphrastic poem I wrote last year with the painting that inspired it, in an art show to be held in the fall.
     Here is a little something that is helping put my Monday morning into perspective;

For Each Ecstatic Instant


by Emily Dickinson

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

Maids and Butlers and No Help At All

      Emily made the news again this week with this interesting new look at her work by author Aife Murray. It is especially interesting to contrast this glimpse into her life against the backdrop of the other story that I recently posted about regarding her late life love affair.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/american-life/Servants-Enhanced-Work-of-Renowned-American-Poet-96883084.html
    It also makes a lot of sense to me when you compare her life story to my own. I would be a prolific (though not necessarily talented) writer too, if I had a kitchen maid and other house and yard servants to tend to my home and family for me. Almost everything that takes me away from my work are responsibilities that Emily was able to delegate to servants who in turn gave her daily life interesting nuances to write even more about. And then for someone else to write about yet again a century later. Can you tell how frustrated I am?! I have had a pretty hard week, peppered primarily with pet problems, and had no help at all which gets frustrating sometimes.
     I didn't like the images that came up when I googled maid, so I switched to butler, and this guy comes up about 100 times more than Rhett. Don't know who he is, but now I want a butler more than I want a maid. I'm pretty sure it would enhance my writing.

Dwelling in Possibility

    My brother Will sent me this link, and I am so glad he did. I loved reading it, and can't resist sharing it with you. It makes me think of the Mona Lisa. One can not know what a woman is really thinking. I see some interesting underlying ideas to ponder about the ethics of the poet (all of us, not just Emily). And also find it a bit intriguing that Emily's "improbable" tryst started when she was 47 years old, suggesting that perhaps I do not need to adopt any "cobweb attitudes" of my own. . . Emily’s secret love - The Boston Globe

The thing with feathers

     I've been hesitant to write this post, maybe because it is a little too personally revealing. I'm not sure.
     First, I said I would expound on the discovery I made while listening to Dana Jennings talk last week. Not a big discovery, but something that surprised me quite a bit. Didn't see it coming at all.
     Pretty much since I decided to get serious as a writer, I've been told that I have to declare a genre. Mostly by graduate schools, but one gets the question all of the time, even from other writers. Last week at Writer's Night Out, I was asked to write my genre on my name tag, and I couldn't do it. I put a big fat question mark there instead. This has been a problem for me for years now. I write across all of the genres, and I have no desire to change that. I really want to learn to be a better poet and fiction writer, not just one or the other. I've wrestled with this conondrum to a degree that would probably seem silly to most people.
     But it was while listening to Dana talk about his work (he also does several kinds of writing) and how one finds their voice, that I realized that most of the writing that I do, what I seem to be a bit better at, is actually non-fiction. Don't know why it took me so long to figure that out. The vast majority of writing projects I have been drawn too, including blogging, are non-fiction or creative non-fiction, often with a historical angle of some kind. So, I'm thinking that is where my authentic voice must be. But I still want to become a good writer in general. I can not imagine ever abandoning poetry.
       Yesterday, I had the good fortune of seeing a chataqua performance of Emily Dickinson at my local library. It was captivating. And I kept having strange feelings of affinity with Emily that had never occured to me before. Like Emily, I have been feeling more and more the need to withdraw and hunker down at home, where I can focus on my work to the greatest degree posssible. In examing her life and my own. I wonder ~ is this an ascent into a serious literary life, or a descent into middle age madness? Though she shunned personal interaction she wrote several letters a day to many different correspondents, and I chuckled at the correlation of that with my own FaceBook habit. The following is a list of quotes from Emily about her life, that reflect my very own feeings about mine, more than a century later.

~ This is freedom.
~ The perfected life.
~ How do people live without their thoughts?
~ Words are my dearest companion.
~  Home is my definition of God.
~ Publication is the auction of the mind of man.
~ We stagger under the wieght of grief.
~  ...  then the letting go.

 is the thing with feathers---

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—



And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—



I've heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.