Summer is for Reading Emily Dickinson

Hi Everyone,

I just posted a review over at Kate Brauning’s “The Bookshelf” for a delicious novel entitled Nobody’s Secret.  (Chronicle 2013.) Written by Michaela MacColl, the story stars America’s #1 reclusive poet Emily Dickinson as a lively, driven young girl out to solve a murder (!) about a dapper young fellow she happened to meet.  (No—he was not a snake in the grass sort.)  I really enjoyed reading this book and wanted to share it with you.

Of course reading the novel lead me to reading E.D’s poetry and what can I say but it is a balm for the soul.  An elixir for my word-weary brain, the way she just lays everything out there, so neatly simple, like a well-made bed with a cool, hand-stitched quilt and artfully arranged pillow-shams. One just wants to revel in her word-choice. 

I shall refrain from even trodding the well-worn path of discussing her poems, for I fear the glare of scholars everywhere peering down their noses at my sophomoric attempt to expound upon her poetry’s merits.  Instead, let me offer you a painless link, where you can go and dabble your own feet in her cool stream of thought.

Summer is for reading Emily’s poetry.  Which is your favorite?

  The complete poems of Emily Dickinson here.

 

A Prankish Poem Published

I did not win a coveted place in the agent’s round over at Cupid’s Literary Connection.  C’est la vie.

However, I will forever be known for the “cockroach incident”, which is something at the very least.

 

Today, for your reading pleasure, I am going to post a poem I helped to "write" back in the dark ages in college.  Well, actually, a quartet of drunken English majors came up with it.  After a night of drinking wine and hob-snobbing our local college literary magazine for its rather “modern” taste in poetry, someone came up with the idea to publish our Scrabble game we had just finished, in order of words played, (and our scores) to see if it would get accepted and published.

It did.

Here it is:

Marla’s Voice

Bar )(
Bad Mad Yarn
No Gem Gag
Our Gave Hem.
Help! Snotty! Mint?
Queen Snot-Rag:
30, 22, 69, 26…Date!
At The Oil Spit Is Wed: Scar, Cruel, Woe, Sex.

Cuz Art We Knife. Zip.

Liar!

 

 

We also contrived a bio for the author, who went by the mysterious one-name of “Dunkirk” .  This was obviously before the time everyone was hooked up to the nines through the internet, otherwise this bird would never have flown.

We even went so far as to send in a recording to be played at the poetry reading. (Someone knew someone in New Orleans who mailed it in for us.)  One of the Scrabble-poets (who does a bang-up Scottish accent) read it, and the recording speed was slowed down to sound like a 45 record played on 32.  (This will mean nothing to many of you.)  I recall it sounded a wee bit like Sean Connery on downers.  We were polite enough not to attend the reading.

We owned up to the prank via a phone message a month after graduation.  My apologies again to editors Rob and Carla.  It was nothing personal.  Just college high-jinx.  And who knows, perhaps it was—in its own odd way, a literary achievement…of sorts.
Well, that’s what I gotta do to get published, apparently.  Any crazy blue-stocking stunts in your closet?

~Just Jill