I May Be Suggesting Emily Dickinson Is a Vampire
“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” - Emily Dickinson
I’ve never been particularly interested in the personal lives of poets and maybe time has become elastic like the video “Time, Tarkovsky, and the Pandemic” suggests so it’s good to read how people are finding joy in little things these days and listen to how others are recreating the sounds of sitting in your favorite pub and I’m not suggesting
Emily Dickinson was a vampire like Paul Lake posits of Lord Byron in his gothic novel “Among the Immortals” but maybe something like Adam and Eve in my one of my favorite films “Only Lovers Left Alive” by Jim Jarmusch
it’s not the one about poetry that he wrote a poem for the film with Adam Driver that’s “Paterson” as in New Jersey and William Carlos Williams which is another favorite film and poet but I haven’t found much about what was her favorite music outside of this thesis by Louise Reglin from 1971 titled “Music in the Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson”
which I guess is comprehensive at 132 pages about the music she listened to and how it affected her poems but I want to know what was her favorite music because she’s been a favorite of composers with over 1,600 settings of her poems to music as of 1992 according to a dude named Carlton in this article “The Sound of Startled Glass” which has a great title but also doesn’t
talk about her favorite music she was such an odd and eccentric person and maybe we think that she was odd and eccentric because there aren’t many more than “11 Poetic Facts about Emily Dickinson” so why am I thinking so much about Emily Dickinson these days and her odd smile in that one famous photo except that it is National Poetry Month and so yes I’m thinking about poetry but no I’m not
recording a poem a day like I did last year which is the best way to practice something you love is to do it every day and keep “cannot” unknown to possibility (poem 361) but I really do love to record sounds with a microphone and I also love reading poems out loud which makes them easier to record using a microphone because when I read poems out loud
the poem tends to dictate the pace and there’s a physical response in my body which is mostly water and air which are both physical and great conductors of sound so the poem resonates with the words and I feel closer to the unique and first essential need that was the utterance that became language anyway that’s getting into
it’s weird that Emily almost always wore a white dress in her later life and left all those poems and wanted to be buried in a white robe in a white coffin and there was that terror she experienced in 1862 that she couldn’t tell anyone about and how bright light hurt her eyes but she didn’t die
until 1886 and it was her niece that added “Called Back” to her tombstone which isn’t her original tombstone but is the name of a novel Emily loved but maybe the dead aren’t sentimental about these things.