Ann Haubrich. Courtesy of the St. Louis Poetry Center
If Whitman's the Pop of American Poetry, Emily Dickinson (spinster though she was) is the Ma. Whitman was the self-promoter-slash-poetic-carnival barker; Emily was the mystic who used an emdash like a pointing magic wand (and that's just one piece of punctuation, whew). In fact, Emily was so mysterious, we are still figuring her out more than 100 years later; a recently unearthed photograph only served to make her more complex, and somehow harder to figure out.
One thing that is not mysterious: Dickinson was a poetic genius, and her poems are a joy to hear read out loud. And so in honor of National Poetry Month (which is April, for all you non-poetry folks) The St. Louis Poetry Center is doing a group reading of Dickinson's work at the Duck Room, and titling it "The Belle of Blueberry Hill." If you were snoozing during English class and missed out on the American poetry unit, here's a quick bio from STLPC:
"On April 15, 1862, one of the most significant dates in the history of American literature, Emily Dickinson sent a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It contained four poems. Dickinson was thirty-one and lived in Amherst, Massachusetts. Higginson, a man of letters, lived in Worcester. She asked if her poems 'breathed.' It was the breath, he would later write, of a 'wholly new and original poetic genius.' The critic Helen Vendler describes Dickinson as revolutionary, an 'inventor of a new form of poetry on the page.' Yet only six of her poems were published in her lifetime. And none with her consent. By the time of her death in 1886 she had left nearly 2000 brief lyrics in her Amherst home, where she lived as a recluse the last thirty years of her life. The Emily Dickinson publication machine took off shortly after, driven by family and friends."
Also recommended for snoozers (which was your loss! But we're here to help you out) and non-snoozers alike: The Poetry Foundation's extensive digital archive of her poems.
The line-up of readers includes poet Eugene Redmond; actor Susie Wall (who's played Dickinson in productions of The Belle of Amherst); KWMU DJ Bob McCabe; poet Katy Didden, co-director of the Observable Reading Series; poet and SIU-E professor Allison Funk; Wash U professor and legendary novelist William Gass, whose novel, Middle C, was released last month; and Ann Haubrich, managing director of Prison Performing Arts and host of KDHX's "Literature for the Halibut." There will also be a silent auction of rare and limited-edition books as well as work from local artists, including Ed Boccia, Ken Botnick, Jon Cournoyer, Michael Eastman, Barry Leibman, Buzz Spector, Mary King Swayzee and Jane Birdsall-Lander.
This is the Poetry Center's big fundraiser for the year—in the past, they've rounded up local artists and culture folks to read Baudelaire, Yeats, Bishop, and Ovid. They have been around since 1946, and their absence would mean the loss of roughly half the poetry programming in town, including Second Friday Notes, Observable Readings, Poetry at the Point, poetry workshops at the U. City Public Library, and a number of contests and education programs, including outreach to schools and prisons.
The Belle of Blueberry Hill: Emily Dickinson at the Duck Room happens on Sunday, April 7 from 4 to 6 p.m. Tickets for the reading and champagne reception are $50 and $60 at the door. For more information, call (314) 973-0616.
