The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst is hosting its annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival this week, including marathon readings of Dickinson’s work.
It coincides with a new exhibit at the poet’s former homestead – called “A Something Overtakes The Mind.”
Matt Donovan directs the poetry center at Smith College and Ligia Bouton teaches art at Mount Holyoke College. The married couple created the new exhibit, which combines domestic items found among Emily Dickinson’s belongings with words both by and about the 19th century poet.
Bouton said they wanted to recognize and honor the mystery in her work.
“I think she really was a poet who wasn't so interested in having us understand everything that she's saying,” said Bouton, “but actually to use our own imaginations and to let the words evoke things for us.”
The project includes videotaped interviews of community members reading some of Dickinson’s almost 2000 poems, including lines such as:
“Who robbed the woods? The trusting woods.”
“Some keep the Sabbath going to church. I keep it staying at home.”
“The day that I was crowned was like the other days until the coronation came. And then twas otherwise.”
“The stereotypes around Emily Dickinson are that she wrote about nature, she wrote about death. And it's so much more than that,” said Donovan. “The poems can be hilarious. They can be subversive. They can be these delicate moments of observation. So there's no one way to catalog her work, which is one of the ways in which her poems keep inviting us back into them over and over again.”
Elements of the exhibit
One room of the exhibit features an unfinished quilt made of paper fragments. Bouton said it’s meant to reflect Dickinson’s habit of writing her poems on scraps of papers like envelopes or even homework assignments.
“Do you see there's the word ‘deal’ right there,” Bouton points out on the quilt, under glass.
“And so there's this wonderful kind of mystery in these little scraps of paper that are on the back of these quilt pieces. Like, is it possible that some of this handwriting is Emily's? There is maybe a poem in there that we never got to see, because it got cut up and used as a part of the quilt.”
In another corner, projected inside an original wash basin from the house, there’s a video of the nearby Fort River, where you can see fragments of Dickinson’s poems floating along the water on paper scraps.
“Some of them are very legible. Some of them aren't very legible. And that is actually purposeful,” Bouton said, “like an idea or a thought or a line of poetry being just out of reach suddenly, and that you think that you got to the piece of paper in time to write it down, but then you didn't.”
There’s one wall where posters are cut in the shape of wallpaper fragments from Emily Dickinson’s room. They feature phrases that literary critics wrote about Dickinson, focusing on her famous use of one type of punctuation: the Em-Dash.
Among the phrases: “stretching stitches of the tugging bodice,” “signs of impatient eagerness,” “an invisible arrowhead,” “a nervous breath,” “The dash as a minus sign.”
The exhibit is not overtly political, but the curators hope it allows some insight into our current moment in history. For example, Bouton said, Emily Dickinson was an independent woman at a time when that was very difficult.
And Bouton said the simple act of creating art could — and still can — be subversive.
“I think we don't talk enough about the value of cultural production. Having voices and preserving the voices of our culture is incredibly important at any time, and I think now more than ever,” she said. “It’s about our collective humanity.”
And Donovan said museums themselves are meant to be inclusive and can help counter what’s going on in the political sphere.
“The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney has a line where he says, 'no poem ever stopped a tank,'” Donovan said. “At the same time, we are living in a moment where language is being devalued every day, where language has sometimes lost its meaning in the world. And Dickinson is a poet who is striving after the tool of language as a means of interrogating the world and unpacking the mysteries of human existence.”
Emily Dickinson died in 1886 at the age of 55. The Tell It Slant poetry festival takes place through this weekend. The exhibit, "A Something Overtakes the Mind," is up until December.
