Further in Summer than the Birds –
Pathetic from the Grass –
A minor Nation celebrates
It’s unobtrusive Mass.
No Ordinance be seen –
So gradual the Grace
A gentle Custom it becomes –
Enlarging Loneliness –
Antiquest felt at Noon –
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify –
Remit as yet no Grace –
No furrow on the Glow,
But a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now –
The Angle of a Landscape –
That every time I wake –
Between my Curtain and the Wall
Opon an ample Crack –
Like a Venetian – waiting –
Accosts my open eye –
Is just a Bough of Apples –
Held slanting, in the Sky –
The Pattern of a Chimney –
The Forehead of a Hill –
Sometimes – a Vane’s Forefinger –
But that’s – Occasional –
The Seasons – shift – my Picture –
Opon my Emerald Bough,
I wake – to find no – Emeralds –
Then – Diamonds – which the Snow
From Polar Caskets – fetched me –
The Chimney – and the Hill –
And just the Steeple’s finger –
These – never stir at all –
A Bird, came down the Walk –
He did not know I saw –
He bit an Angle Worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass –
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass –
He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad –
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head. –
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home –
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim
Join us for free screening of the SxSW dramatic comedy ‘Wild Nights with Emily,’ — starring Molly Shannon as the beloved poet Emily Dickinson. Followed by a Q&A with director Madeleine Olnek, and Emily Dickinson Museum curator Jane Wald. Don’t miss this opportunity to see the movie IndieWire called “hilarious” and “touching”!
Location: The screening will take place in Lipton Lecture Hall in the Amherst College Science Center on the east side of campus from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The hall is room E110 and is located on the first floor by the cafe.
Parking: Parking is available along East Drive and Merrill Science Drive and no permit is required (even if indicated).
In the mid-19th century, Emily Dickinson is writing prolifically, baking gingerbread, and enjoying a passionate, lifelong relationship with another woman, her friend and sister-in-law Susan. Beloved comic Molly Shannon leads in this humorous yet bold reappraisal of Dickinson, informed by her private letters. While seeking publication of some of the 1,789 poems written during her lifetime, Emily (Shannon) finds herself facing a troupe of male literary gatekeepers too confused by her genius to take her work seriously. Instead her work attracts the attention of an ambitious woman editor, who also sees Emily as a convenient cover for her own role in buttoned-up Amherst’s most bizarre love triangle.
Madeleine Olnek is a New York City based playwright and filmmaker. Her third feature film, Wild Nights With Emily, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from NYSCA and Jerome Foundation funds. Her second feature, The Foxy Merkins, included screenings at Sundance 2014, BAM Cinemafest, Lincoln Center, and an NYC theatrical run at IFP. The film had its international premiere at the Moscow Film Festival. Her debut feature, Codependent Lesbian Sex Alien Seeks Same, premiered at Sundance 2011. Its screening included MoMa, The Viennale and the Festival do Rio. Nominated for a Gotham award, it had theatrical runs in LA and NYC. Her award-winning and widely screened comedy shorts, “Countertransference” (2009), and “Hold Up” (2006), were official selections of Sundance; “Make Room For Phyllis” (2007) premiered at Sarasota. Olnek was awarded best female short film director at Sundance in 2009, by LA’s Women In Film organization.
Pre-registration is strongly suggested for the following Festival Workshops:
In this family-friendly workshop, multilingual poet María Luisa Arroyo will warmly welcome and guide participants to draw pictures and write new poems. Multicultural and multilingual children’s books, such Francisco Alarcón’s Poems to Dream Together, will inspire participants of all ages and stages to create images and poems using their family or heart language(s). At the end, María Luisa will encourage participants to share their new work.
If a poet creates pictures with words, and an artist tells stories with images, what narrative possibilities emerge when the two work in tandem? This dynamic workshop will share inspiration, strategies, and prompts for creating imagery in response to words, creating words in response to imagery, and experimenting with the real-time collaborative high jinks of mixing the two. Participants will look at highlights from landmark collaborations by Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers, Anne Carson and Bianca Stone. This workshop is perfect for all levels in either writing or visual art. Participants will leave feeling electrified by new ways of thinking and creating and with an original visual/verse piece!
Please fill out the form below to secure your space. You will receive a success message once your form has submitted. An Amherst Poetry Festival representative will contact you via email with a confirmation and more information.
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THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM RECEIVES OVER $350,000 IN GRANTS FOR INTERPRETIVE PLANNING, OPERATING SUPPORT, AND RESTORATION
The grants will be used to improve and increase access to Emily Dickinson’s poetic and personal legacy in the place she called home.
(AMHERST, Mass., August 28, 2019) – Today the Emily Dickinson Museum announced that it will receive over $350,000 in grants for interpretive planning, operational support, and restoration. The grants include a Public Humanities Planning grant of $63,025 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The NEH award will support a year of interpretive planning to unite the Museum’s historic spaces and collections to better serve its growing contemporary audience. Public Humanities Planning grants from the NEH are typically awarded for up to $40,000 per grantee, but larger sums are granted to exceptionally ambitious and complex proposals like the Museum’s.
Program Director Brooke Steinhauser says the grants will allow the Museum to “incorporate current scholarship and more inclusive methodologies of interpretation” into its already vibrant programming. As the site of the largest and most varied collection of non-manuscript objects associated with Emily Dickinson and her family, and as the site where Dickinson penned nearly all of her 1,789 poems, the grants will help the Museum to consider how to provide interpretation of and access to its resources, resulting in the best possible visitor experience.
The Emily Dickinson Museum is one of 16 humanities projects this cycle to receive a grant from the NEH for planning or implementation, all of which will support vital research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities preserves America’s rich history and cultural heritage, by encouraging and supporting scholarship and innovation in history, archaeology, philosophy, literature, and other humanities disciplines. In addition to the work at the Emily Dickinson Museum, this round of grants will enable continued work on the papers of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, as well as publication of the complete speeches, correspondence, and writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a new scholarly edition and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In addition to the NEH grant, the Museum will receive $245,673 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, $30,000 from the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund, and $12,200 from the Massachusetts Culture Council’s Cultural Investment Portfolio. The IMLS grant will be used to catalog, manage, and maintain its 8,000+ piece collection. The planning grant from the Facilities Fund will be used to plan the restoration of the hallways, parlors, and bedrooms in the Museum, tripling the amount of restored interpretive space in the Homestead. The grant from the Cultural Investment Portfolio will support operations at the Museum. Executive Director Jane Wald says the grants will help to transform the Museum’s interpretation by “preparing to restore this private poet’s public spaces to their appearance during her most important writing years.”
Since its inception, the Emily Dickinson Museum has welcomed more than 150,000 visitors from 50 countries and serves as the premier center for study, interpretation, and celebration of Emily Dickinson’s place in literature, history, and culture. These awards will support the Museum’s mission to spark the imagination by amplifying Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice from the place she called home. The Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Learn more at www.EmilyDickinsonMuseum.org.
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. They advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grant making, research, and policy development. Their vision is a nation where museums and libraries work together to transform the lives of individuals and communities. To learn more, visit www.imls.gov.
Managed in collaboration with MassDevelopment, the Cultural Facilities Fund provides major improvement grants to nonprofit cultural organizations, in recognition of their profound economic impact on communities across Massachusetts. Since 2006, the Fund has encouraged sound growth, supported important development projects, played a crucial role in the growth of local tourism, created thousands of jobs, and driven millions of dollars in private investment.
The Cultural Investment Portfolio provides both general operation and project-based grants to nonprofit organizations that enrich Massachusetts’ cultural life. The Portfolio works to strengthen a cultural sector that generates $1.2 billion in economic activity, creates thousands of jobs, and delivers programs to more than 20 million people a year. Not just a funder, the Portfolio is a source of invaluable expertise, advocacy, and peer dialogue.
Tickets are now available from March 1 — May 15. Make your plans to visit the place she called home.
Wednesday-Sunday, 10am-5pm ET
Please note that The Evergreens is closed due to construction of the nearby carriage house. We apologize for the inconvenience. Learn more about The John and Elizabeth Armstrong Carriage House.
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The Emily Dickinson Museum is open to visitors March through December. Begin your visit at the Museum’s Tour Center, located in the Homestead, to check-in for an existing reservation or to purchase tour tickets. From there, visit our Museum shop, grounds, and gardens, all of which are open to the public. Last entry to the Museum is at 4PM.
Purchasing tickets online ahead of your visit is recommended.
Tickets: Prices include visits to both houses — visitors reserve consecutive timed entry to the Homestead.
| Adult | $20 |
| Students (18+) | $15 |
| Youth (17 and Under) | Free |
| Five College Students | Free |
| EBT / WIC / ConnectorCare Card | Free (up to 2 tickets) |
Further discounts available by calling the Tour Center:
| Teachers | $15 |
| Amherst College Faculty & Staff | Free |
| Museum Professionals (AAM, NEMA) | Free |
Massachusetts residents who are EBT, WIC, and ConnectorCare cardholders receive free museum admission to our daily tour program (valid two per cardholder). See the complete list of participating organizations offering EBT, WIC,and ConnectorCare discounts.
Closed
December 23 – February 28
Open Starting March 1
Wednesday – Sunday, 10am-5pm
Scholar Páraic Finnerty presents this lecture on Emily Dickinson and her British contemporaries. He will discuss Dickinson’s reading of and response to three of her favorite British poets—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson—in relation to their nineteenth-century U.S. reception. The lecture will focus on the impact of Tennyson’s and Browning’s development and popularization of the dramatic lyric (later termed the dramatic monologue) on Dickinson’s poetics. In the process, Finnerty will explore how this context provides a new way of interpreting Dickinson’s poetry. Time for questions and answers will follow the talk.
This program is free and open to the public.
About the speaker: Páraic Finnerty is Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare and co-author of Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle (2013). He is currently working on a monograph entitled Dickinson and her British Contemporaries, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Emily Dickinson International Society and serves on the Editorial Board of the Emily Dickinson Journal.
Submissions will be judged on the following:
In Suspension
A site-specific art installation at the Emily Dickinson Museum featuring work by Tereza Swanda, Ingrid Pichler, and Fletcher Boote
The Emily Dickinson Museum is pleased to present this first site-specific art installation in the restored Homestead conservatory. In this small greenhouse Dickinson tended flowers “near and foreign,” forging a deep connection that permeated her poetry and daily life. Imagine dirt under the poet’s fingernails as she wrote the poems that immortalized flowers blooming in her garden, home, and Amherst’s fields and woodlands.
This mixed-media installation aims to forge the colors Dickinson saw from the conservatory out into her landscape. In this meditation on suspension, colors change based on the atmosphere, and the space between subjects. Light from color gels is cast throughout the room by projection and refraction. Sound is a complimentary element to color.
The installation is best viewed from inside the conservatory, which is open from 11AM-4:30PM each day the Museum is open (Wednesday through Monday). All are welcome inside to view the installation, but the space is restricted to four people at a time. Photography inside the installation is most welcome.
About the artists:
Tereza Swanda teaches at Dean College and has 20 years of color theory through painting. She graduated from Mass Art in Boston with a degree in Sculpture and Painting and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has exhibited her own work extensively both locally, nationally and internationally over the last ten years. Learn more: https://www.mamatereza.net/
Ingrid Pichler specializes in site-specific glass installation for the private and public sector and is a visiting lecturer at Salem State University. Pichler has been working in architectural glass for almost thirty years. Throughout her career, her hands-on approach has enabled her to develop a keen understanding of the transformative potential of light in the context of architectural glass. Most of her works have been commissioned, location-specific installations, utilizing a wide range of techniques from traditional painting and staining, to new innovation for fusing and casting in contemporary glass technology. Learn more: http://www.pichlerart.com/
Fletcher Boote is a composer and performer investigating nuances of human relationships as they are expressed in arrangements of sounds. She has recently taught sound healing and vocal workshops at Princeton University and lead courses at Johnson State College. Boote has been working in sound for over a decade and has worked with students of Meredith Monk. Learn more: http://fletcherboote.com/