VIRTUAL PROGRAM

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Registration is required for this virtual program and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20.
Please select the ticket price that is right for you, and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

REGISTER

Join Elizabeth Bradley, Education Programs Manager at the Emily Dickinson Museum, for an introduction to digital tools available for teaching and reading Dickinson. We’ll explore the materiality of Dickinson’s poetry and place through online resources that make her story more accessible than ever.

In this program, we’ll investigate pairings of poems with objects from the Museum’s digital collection and other repositories. What can personal domestic objects teach us about Dickinson’s life and her family’s pastimes, labors, and values? What can reading Dickinson’s poetry about the “lives” of man-made objects teach us about the force objects, themselves, exert on the world? Through discussion and prompts, we’ll consider strategies for reading objects as primary sources and how to us them to bring Dickinson’s material world to life.

Elizabeth Bradley is the Education Programs Manager at the Emily Dickinson Museum, where they work to create inclusive opportunities for learning, connection, and creative expression. In addition to managing programs for K-12 and College students, they curate the Museum’s poetry discussion group and serve on the steering committee of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival. Elizabeth holds an MA with focuses in Nineteenth Century American Cultural History and Public History. Outside of work, they enjoy many hobbies, but the most Dickinsonian is exploring the flora and fauna of Western Massachusetts.

IN-PERSON PROGRAM

• July 29th  9am – 12pm ET
• August 26th  9am – 12pm ET
• October 7th  9am – 12pm ET

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Registration is required for this virtual program and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20.
Please select the ticket price that is right for you, and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

REGISTER

Amid her many unforgettable poems, a surprising number of Emily Dickinson’s poems begin with an “IF”. 

If she had been the Mistletoe/ And I had been the Rose/ How gay upon your table/ My velvet life to close

If pain for peace prepares/ Lo what “Augustan” years— 

If I should die/ And you should live/ And time should gurgle on— 

These iffy openings not only destabilizes the present, it opens the poem to the richness and pleasure of multiple imaginative  realms.  Yet how does the “if” help us read Dickinson, and poetry more broadly? If we began our own writing with an if, what words or worlds might we discover?  In this workshop, we’ll examine Dickinson, as well as other poets across time,  looking at poems that begin in speculative space, exploring how we too might write poems that begin in surprise and motor towards wisdom, or delight. Our time will include close reading, discussion, and prompts.

Headshot of Tess Taylor

Tess Taylor is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry including Work & Days, which was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. Taylor has been Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Northern Ireland, and the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. She has also served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Taylor lives in El Cerrito, California, where she tends to fruit trees and backyard chickens.

Questions?
Email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Phosphorescence October 2024 featured poets:
Stephanie Choi, Saba Keramati, and Samyak Shertok

VIRTUAL PROGRAM 

This virtual program is free to attend. Registration is required. 

REGISTER

To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. Join us on a Thursday evening each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.

About this month’s poets:

Stephanie Choi’s poems appear in Copper Nickel, Blackbird, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona and the University of Utah. She is currently the poet-in-residence at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her debut collection, The Lengest Neoi, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2024. xostephchoi.com

Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her debut poetry collection, Self-Mythology, was selected by Patricia Smith for publication in the Miller Williams Poetry Series at University of Arkansas Press, and is forthcoming in Spring 2024. A winner of the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Prize, Saba holds an MFA from UC Davis, where she was a Dean’s Graduate Fellow for Creative Arts. She is the Poetry Editor at Sundog Lit. sabakeramati.com

Samyak Shertok’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A Fine Arts Work Center Writing Fellow and a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is currently the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University.

Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Phosphorescence events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of our programs. All gifts are tax-deductible.

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Registration is required for this virtual program and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20.
Please select the ticket price that is right for you, and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

REGISTER

It feels a shame to be Alive –
When Men so brave – are dead –
One envies the Distinguished Dust –
Permitted – such a Head –
(fragment Fr524)

Although myths about Emily Dickinson portray her removed from the issues of her day, current scholarship proves that Dickinson was profoundly concerned with and affected by the issues that caused the American Civil War and wrote many poems about them, such as this one, which implicates the speaker directly in a kind of survivor’s guilt. In fact, in the summer of 2020 as we began to write poems about the Black Lives Matter movements, we looked to Dickinson’s extensive Civil War poems for inspiration about this earlier social movement to liberate Black lives. The result is our co-written collection of poems, Within Flesh: In Conversation with Our Selves and Emily Dickinson, published in 2024. Written by a Muslim man of Iranian descent and a Jewish woman from Brooklyn, it offers a unique three-way conversation over space and time about the history of social injustices and how we begin to repair ourselves and the broken world.

We will frame this seminar with readings from Within Flesh to illustrate how Dickinson’s poems facilitated our creative work on contemporary issues and can provide the impetus for your students to think deeply about the world around them. Our goal is to provide you with materials for a unit or assignment on Dickinson and the War as a mirror for exploring social movements of our own time. As a resource, we will use two posts from Ivy’s year-long and freely-accessible blog, “White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862”, which explores the Battle of Antietam and the use of photography (the new social medium of the day, which radically changed the reach and effect of the war.) We will discuss how to contextualize Dickinson’s war poetry, the poetic strategies she used to represent the war, and her recurring themes and images. We will end with a few of our poetic “conversations” as examples.

Born in Southern California, Al Salehi is a multilingual American poet and entrepreneur of Persian descent who lives in Orange County with a background in technology. Al graduated from UCLA and went on to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Al is a graduate from Dartmouth College’s Guarini Graduate School where he studied Creative Writing, and currently serves on the Alumni Council. He also completed a creative writing program at the University of Oxford, Exeter College. Al’s short film Love, Basketball won second place in the My Hero International Film Festival, 2021, under the “Poetry” category. He has published and/or presented poetry in the Society of Classical Poets, The Dartmouth Writers Society, The United Nations Association, Southwest Airlines, O.C. Registrar, Dartmouth Leslie Center Lifeline’s Poetry Share, Houston Library Poetry Share, Clamantis Journal, and the Dartmouth Medical School Lifeline’s Journal. Al’s collection, Enter Atlas, was a Semi-Finalist for the University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, judged by Natasha Trethewey.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, and raised in a Jewish-American family, Ivy Schweitzer has lived in Vermont for many years and taught courses in American Literature and Women and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. She has recently published poetry in Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Antiphon volume 19, Clear Poetry, Passager, Ritualwell, Tikkun, New Croton Review, Mississippi Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. In 2018, she felt called by Emily Dickinson to spend a year immersed in that poet’s most creative period in which she wrote almost a poem a day; the result is a year-long weekly blog called White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862, https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/whiteheat. In February 2024, she and Al Salehi published their co-written book of poetry titled “Within Flesh: In Conversation with Ourselves and Emily Dickinson.” Her solo collection, titled Tumult, Whitewash and Stretch Marks, will appear from Finishing Line Press in 2025.
sites.dartmouth.edu/ivyschweitzer

Questions?
Email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival returns September 23 – 29, 2024!
SAVE THE DATE — Registration details coming soon. 

Join us for a week of events happening both online and in-person at the Museum. Registration TBA!

The Emily Dickinson Museum’s annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is an event with international reach that celebrates Emily Dickinson’s poetic legacy and the contemporary creativity she and her work continues to inspire from the place she called home.

This year’s FREE and hybrid Festival includes events happening online, as well as in-person at the Museum under our heated tent. Save the date — registration details coming soon!

Learn more about the 2024 lineup below. 

THE SCHEDULE:

Monday, September 23:
6-8:30pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 1
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener or reader by registering for the Festival.

Tuesday, September 24:
12-2:15pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 2
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener or reader by registering for the Festival.
6-7:30pm [Virtual] — Our Roots as Muse: Family & Ancestry as Creative Inspiration
Facilitators will lead participants in a series of generative writing exercises using personal family and ancestral history as creative inspiration and content. Participants will leave the workshop with at least two writing sketches and other writing resources to continue developing their ideas and creatively archiving their own family histories.
Featuring .chisaraokwu. and Tamara J. Madison.
6:30-8pm [Virtual] — Telling our Medical Stories Slant
In this workshop, participants will learn how to translate their personal stories of illness and disability into poetry, something Dickinson herself practiced, and something that’s employed by practitioners of Narrative/Poetic Medicine.
Featuring Rosemarie Dombrowski and Catharine Clark-Sayles.

Wednesday, September 25:
12-2:15pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 3
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener or reader by registering for the Festival.
4:30-6pm [Virtual] — Poetry, Spirituality, and New Forms of Attention
Emily Dickinson’s poems interact with silence to open spaces of questioning, recognition, and keen attention to spiritual matters and questions of meaning. In this workshop, we’ll place our own poetry in the context of Dickinson’s poetry, offer a short guided meditation and generative prompts for participants to explore their own relation to silence, voice, and spiritual attention.
Featuring Rachel Zucker and Nadia Colburn.
7:30-9pm [Virtual] — “Bee! I’m expecting you”: Dialogues with the Non-Human
Emily Dickinson lived in a time of ecological change and painful civil conflict. Against this backdrop, Dickinson’s poems reach out to the world around her—the frog, the snake, the hummingbird, train, “slant of light,” even the “loaded gun,” addressing these others as companions, fellow witnesses. In this panel, poets explore both Dickinson’s and their own dialogues with the nonhuman.
Featuring Carolina Ebeid, Julia Guez, Anna V. Q. Ross, and Tess Taylor.

Thursday, September 26:
12-2:15pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 4
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener or reader by registering for the Festival.
6-7:15pm [Virtual] — Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Reading
Festival edition of the Museum’s monthly poetry reading series. Hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.
Featuring Jane Huffman, Molly Akin, and Diane Seuss.

Friday, September 27:
12-2:15pm [Virtual] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 5
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. This session takes place entirely virtually and is open to both readers and listeners. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener or reader by registering for the Festival.
3-4:30pm [Hybrid] — Poetry Masterclass with Oliver de la Paz
Hone your craft in this generative writing workshop.
7-8:30pm [Hybrid] — Open Mic Night with Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua

Bring your poems to Emily Dickinson’s garden! Readers will have 5 minutes each to make us feel “physically as if the top of [our] head[s] were taken off!” (Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 16 August 1870) Featured poets Oliver de la Paz and Diannelly Antigua will follow the open mic. Open mic sign-ups will be handled in advance via a Google Form and a lottery, and selected readers will be notified. Stay tuned for the Google form, which will be posted here.

Saturday, September 28:
9:30am-12pm[Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Part 6
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this session, readers must be present on-site, but listeners are welcome both in-person and online. We will be reading from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener or reader by registering for the Festival. 
1-2:30pm [Hybrid] — Poets of the Public: New England Poet Laureates
Poets will share about their role as Poet Laureate in their respective communities, sharing information about the programming we each developed, and will discuss what it means to be a “Civic Poet” with a broad set of responsibilities and audiences while also maintaining one’s own personal writing practice. 
Featuring Oliver de la Paz and Diannely Antigua.
3:30-5pm [Hybrid] — “I am afraid to own a Body”: Continuing Dickinson’s Legacy of Braving the Body
A discussion of Dickinson’s poems about the body and embodied experience, particularly her exploration into the often-contradictory needs between body and mind. A selection of contemporary poems by women and non-binary poets from Braving the Body who have been inspired by Dickinson’s work. Prompts will be provided for a generative writing exercise. 
Featuring Jennifer Franklin, Pichchenda Bao and Nicole Callihan.
7-9pm [Hybrid] — Headliner Night and Garden Party with Carl Phillips and Sebastian Merrill
Join us in Emily Dickinson’s garden or virtually for a celebration of creativity and poetry! Our headlining poets, 2023 Pulitzer Prize recipient Carl Phillips and Sebastian Merrill, read from their work and discuss poetic practice and inspiration.

Sunday, September 29:
10-11:30am [Hybrid] — “Picnic, Lightning”: Concision, Compression, & Brevity in the Very Short Poem
Emily Dickinson is one of the greatest masters of the short poem. In this workshop for writers at all stages in their practice, we’ll focus on the Very Short Poem, the highly pressurized lyric that casts off a resonance far bigger than its real estate.
Featuring Patrick Donnelly.
11:30am-1pm [Hybrid] — The Celtification of Emily Dickinson
Featuring the poems of Emily Dickinson with music and lyrics by Rosemary Caine. If the Irish can claim they saved civilization, then the Wilde Irish Women dare to claim that Margaret Maher saved Emily Dickinson’s poems. Experience the lauded musical play that reveals the unlikely story of a humble Irish maid’s influence on her reclusive mistress, Emily Dickinson. Margaret Maher defied Emily’s deathbed decree to burn her poems. Her brave, independent thinking and courageous action came from being born in Ireland, a country where poems are respected, not burned. But there is so much more to the story…
Featuring Rosie Caine and Wilde Irish Women.

2-4pm [Hybrid] — Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon: Grand Finale
A group reading of all 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson over the course of 7 sessions. For this session, readers must be present on-site, but listeners are welcome both in-person and online. We will read from Ralph Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Sign up as a listener or reader by registering for the Festival. 

FESTIVAL REGISTRATION TBA!

About the Festival:

The Emily Dickinson Museum’s Annual Tell It Slant Poetry Festival is an event with international reach that celebrates Emily Dickinson’s poetic legacy and the contemporary creativity she and her work continues to inspire from the place she called home.

The Festival is named for Dickinson’s poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” underscoring the revolutionary power of poetry to shift our perspective and reveal new truths. Festival organizers are committed to featuring established and emerging poets who represent the diversity of the contemporary poetry landscape and to fostering community by placing poetry in the public sphere. 

This year’s line-up features workshops, panels, and readings, by a diverse and talented group of poets from around the world. The cornerstone of the Festival, the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, is an epic reading of all 1,789 of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

To follow along with the Emily Dickinson Poetry Marathon, get your copy of the Franklin edition from the Emily Dickinson Museum Shop.

The annual event attracts a diverse audience of Dickinson fans and poetry lovers, including students, educators, aspiring writers, and those who are new to poetry and literary events. Past Festival headliners have included Marilyn Nelson, Abigail Chabitnoy, Tracy K. Smith, Tiana Clark, Tess Taylor, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paisley Rekdal, Adrian Matejka, Kaveh Akbar, and Ocean Vuong. 

Support The Tell It Slant Poetry Festival:
Admission to all Poetry Festival events is free–made possible by contributions from Museum supporters.
Please consider making a donation of any size during the registration process or anytime on the Museum’s website.

Phosphorescence September 2024 featured poets:
Jane Huffman, Molly Akin, and Diane Seuss
Tell It Slant Poetry Festival 2024

VIRTUAL PROGRAM – Part of Tell It Slant Poetry Festival

This virtual program is free to attend. Registration is required. 

REGISTER

To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. Join us on a Thursday evening each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.

About this month’s poets:

Molly Akin is a writer based in coastal Massachusetts. A Kansas City native, she explored the world as an “unschooled” teenager before earning a BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MA from Harvard University Extension School. Her work is informed by her experiences as a woman, mother, and person living with invisible disabilities. She was awarded an Honorable Mention in TulipTree Review’s 2023 Wild Woman Story Contest and her work is included in the print edition. She is currently working on her first collection with the support of a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. mollyakin.com

Jane Huffman’s debut collection, Public Abstract, won the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Dana Levin. Jane is a doctoral student in English and literary arts at the University of Denver and is an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. janehuffman.com

Diane Seuss is the author of six collections of poetry. The most recent is Modern Poetry, (Graywolf Press 2024). frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press), received the Juniper Prize. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Seuss is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Phosphorescence events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of our programs. All gifts are tax-deductible.

Phosphorescence August 2024 featured poets:
Omotara James, Willie Lee Kinard III, and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

This virtual program is free to attend. Registration is required. 

REGISTER

To Emily Dickinson, phosphorescence was a divine spark and the illuminating light behind learning — it was volatile, but transformative in nature. Produced by the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Phosphorescence Contemporary Poetry Series celebrates contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice. The Series features established and emerging poets whose work and backgrounds represent the diversity of the flourishing contemporary poetry scene. Join us on a Thursday evening each month to hear from poets around the world as they read their work and discuss what poetry and Dickinson mean to them.

About this month’s poets:

Omotara James is a writer, editor and visual artist. She is the author of the chapbook Daughter Tongue, selected by African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books, for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she is a recipient of the 2019 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. She earned her BA from Hofstra University and received her MFA from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. She is a fellow of Lambda Literary and Cave Canem Foundation. Born in Britain, she is the daughter of Nigerian and Trinidadian immigrants and currently lives in New York City. omotarajames.com

Willie Lee Kinard III is a Black nonbinary poet, designer, educator & musician forged in Newberry, South Carolina. Holding an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, their musings include gospel surrealism, Black romance & superstition. A Fellow of The Watering Hole & a Pushcart Prize nominee, their written work appears (or will soon) in Obsidian, Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, The Rumpus, & elsewhere. williekinard.com

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a transsexual poet. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, The Southeast Review, MoMA Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (2019) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (2016). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and is currently a professor of creative writing. Jennifer lives in California with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their cat and dog. joshuajenniferespinoza.com

Support Phosphorescence and Honor Someone Special:

Admission to all Phosphorescence events is free, but online donations, especially those made in honor or memory of family, friends, or colleagues are heartily encouraged and vital to the future of our programs. All gifts are tax-deductible.

VIRTUAL PROGRAM

For any questions, please e-mail edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Registration is required for this virtual program and is offered on a sliding scale from $5 – $20.
Please select the ticket price that is right for you, and consider supporting the Museum and the participation of other educators through your purchase. Tickets are non-refundable.

REGISTER

Nature and God – I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew Me
They startled, like Executors
Of My identity –
Yet Neither told – that I could learn –
My Secret as secure
As Herschel’s private interest
Or Mercury’s Affair –
(Fr803)

Emily Dickinson’s opening claim in this poem is a bit disingenuous: her poems contain hundreds of references to nature and God. She “knew” them quite well, yet both continually “startled” her, and her true “identity” was an explorer of their “Secrets.”

Dickinson’s allusions to local flora and fauna, as in “The Lilac is an ancient shrub” and “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” are well known, but her fascination with science extended to many fields, from astronomy (as in the Herschel reference above—he discovered Uranus) to geology (including five poems about volcanoes alone) to medicine (five about surgeons) to mathematics, technology, and many more (White).

Science, which she studied with great interest from her school days onward, and which was burgeoning with new developments during her lifetime, provided Dickinson the poet more than a rich technical lexicon and a trove of startling metaphors; it also offered a method for experimenting with spiritual problems.

In this workshop, we will read and discuss a range of Dickinson poems with scientific content and examine the ways they intersect with her lifelong struggles with religious faith, confirming or confounding her understandings of nature and human life. We will also explore contexts for teaching the “science poems.”

Work Cited: White, Fred D. “‘Sweet Skepticism of the Heart’: Science in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.”College Literature, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 121–128.

Bruce M. Penniman, Ed.D., taught writing, speech, and literature at Amherst Regional High School for 36 years and is still an advisor to the Sene-Gambian Scholars exchange program there. He served as Site Director of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has taught numerous graduate courses for teachers. In 1999 he was named Massachusetts Teacher of the Year and finalist for National Teacher of the Year, and he is the author of Building the English Classroom: Foundations, Support, Success (NCTE, 2009). He has been a teacher curriculum mentor in all four NEH Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry, and Place workshops and has facilitated discussions for the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group on topics ranging from “Emily Dickinson and the Bible” to “Emily Dickinson and Science.”

Questions?
Email edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org