Daisies at Dickinson’s grave

This program will be offered remotely! See below for more information on how to participate.

Join us for a beloved annual tradition: The Emily Dickinson Poetry Walk! This event honors the 134th anniversary of the poet’s death with readings of her poetry at historic sites around Amherst. To pay homage to Dickinson’s role in inspiring a new generation of writers, we will also be sharing original poems and thoughts written as part of ‘The World Writes Back: Postcards to Emily Dickinson’ project in December 2019. 

The World Writes Back, an installation of postcards to Emily Dickinson from around the world, was on display in the Homestead during December 2019.

This program is free and open to all. We will host this remote event on Zoom where you will see historical and contemporary images of each “stop” on the walk, and images of postcards. This is a participatory event! Those who wish to read should indicate this on their event registration form. Reading assignments will be made on a first-come, first-served basis. The final “stop” is Dickinson’s grave in West Cemetery where we will offer final thoughts and a light-hearted virtual toast! Those who wish to do so, may submit a brief toast or remarks to the host to be shared at the conclusion of the “walk.”

To join the walk click this link at 12 p.m. (EST) on May 15, 2020

Enjoy a recording of this program:

The Emily Dickinson Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group meets monthly, September through May, for lively conversation about Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters. Each session is facilitated by a guest leader.
Join us for a remote zoom discussion from 12pm to 1:30pm on Friday, May 22. 

Topic: Emily Dickinson and the Mind

Poetry, for Emily Dickinson, is invested with inconceivable possibilities of signification. She reveled in the ecstatic “Madness” of meanings, since, to her, “Much Madness is divinest Sense.”Her forte is to transform the material to the metaphorical, and to question the notion of ‘reality’ as it is conventionally understood.

This session will feature Dickinson and philosophy, spanning her mental philosophy textbooks to parallels between her poetry and the writings of philosopher Immanuel Kant. Dickinson was, like Kant, intrigued with the relation between subject and object, and fascinated with the ‘transcendent’—that goes beyond the boundaries of empirical evidence. Together we will delve into Dickinson’s writing in a way that will allow us to critically appreciate the transcendental depth and autonomy of the poet’s mind.

 Leader: Mousumi Banerjee
Dr. Mousumi Banerjee is an engaged practitioner of the language and its varied manifestations in literature with a flair for research in poetry, the multiple hermeneutic possibilities of which caused her to look at women’s writing and authorial anxiety in her doctoral study that she pursued from Jadavpur University. The voices of women poets from those intellectual edges, that are hitherto identified as the ‘margins’ of literary writing, became the site of her inquiry which led her to publish considerably on the works of supposedly non-canonical women writers. Philosophical writings also enchant her and she looks forward to working on the textuality of such works by various Western thinkers across traditions of thought and practice. She is a passionate teacher in literature and contemporary theory, singer and music enthusiast, and loves to engage in deliberations on other humanistic discourses, in general, and on Emily Dickinson, in particular! She has authored books, named Writing across Genres: Indian Literature, Language and Culture (2015), Daring to Write: The Two Creative Daughters of Victorian England (2015), and Emily Dickinson: Writing as a Woman (2017), and currently has two on-going book-length projects: one on Gitanjali: An Exalted Manifestation of Buddhist Aesthetics, and the other on ‘A thought went up my mind today –’: An Inquiry into a Post-Kantian Transcendental Philosophy in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. She has been awarded with the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship 2019-2020 by the United States- India Education Foundation (USIEF) to pursue her postdoctoral research, and presently she is associated with Amherst College for her work on the book on Dickinson. She greatly appreciates the continuous effort of the Emily Dickinson Museum not only in keeping the memory of the poet alive, but also in encouraging thought and scholarship on the poet’s spectacular poetic oeuvre so as to deeply influence our own lives. 
Registration for this event is now closed. If you have registered, we will email you by Monday, May 18 with a link and more information. Thank you for your interest in this program. If you were not able to join us this time, we hope to see you when the series resumes in September.

Monthly Amherst Arts Night Plus at the Emily Dickinson Museum celebrates contemporary art and poetry in our historic setting. In May we take this monthly event remote with readings by members of the Florence Poets Society!

Join us at 6:30PM for a remote reading from 10 members of the Florence Poets Society. The Society was founded in 2004 and publishes an annual review called Silkworm. This program will feature short readings by the following poets:  

Rosie McMahan breathes and writes and walks and gardens on the steppingstones of her life in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, trying to remember that every day is a new day.

Rich Puchalsky is a freelance librarian.

Marian Kent is the author of three poetry collections, Heart Container, SUPERPOWERS or: More Poems About Flying, and Responsive Pleading. She lives in Easthampton, MA with her family. You can follow Marian’s poetry and other missives at www.runawaysentence.com

Lanette Sweeney of South Hadley, MA, is a full-time writer thanks to her wife’s support; a published poet, fiction and essay writer; a novelist-in-progress; and a current MFA student at Western New England University.

Eileen P. Kennedy’s Banshees (Flutter Press, 2015) was nominated for a Pushcart and awarded Second Prize from the Wordwrite Books Award in Poetry. Her second collection, Touch My Head Softly is due out from Finishing Line Press in 2021. She lives in Amherst, MA with the ghost of Emily Dickinson. More at EileenPKennedy.com.

Howie Faerstein’s most recent book is Googootz (Press 53). He presently volunteers as a mentor at the Center for New Americans and is co-poetry editor of CutThroat, A Journal of the Arts.

Brooks Robards has published five volumes of poetry including On Island. She has recently been published in periodicals: Avocet, Aurorean, Plainsongs, Fulcrum and Equinox. She lives in Northampton, MA, and summers on Martha’s Vineyard.

Linda Bratcher Wlodyka of Cheshire, MA likes to think someone out there in poetry land is wowed or entertained by her poems. That is what really matters to her.

Michael Favala Goldman is a widely-published translator of Danish literature and  a jazz clarinetist.  His new book of poetry is Who has time for this? www.hammerandhorn.net

Lori Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter, Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak and Keeping Planes in the Air, all from Salmon Poetry. Two chapbooks, Inner Sky and typing with e.e. cummings, from Glass Lyre Press. She edits two journals: Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry and Wordpeace.co, an online journal dedicated to social justice.

Enjoy a recording of this past program:

Posted by The Emily Dickinson Museum on Wednesday, May 20, 2020