The Emily Dickinson Museum’s Poetry Discussion Group meets monthly, September through May, for lively conversation about Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters.
Join us on Friday, April 16 from 12pm to 1:30pm EST or Tuesday, April 20, from 6pm to 7:30pm EST on Zoom. Space is limited, and registration for this program is now closed.
This program is free of charge, but we encourage those who are able to do so to make a donation after the program.
Topic: “We – Bee and I – live by the quaffing –”: Exploring Emily Dickinson’s Bees
Bees were incredibly popular figures in nineteenth-century American poetry: Emerson’s “The Humble-Bee” is one celebrated example, but bees also play prominent roles in poems by Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Priscilla Jane Thompson, among many others. What distinguishes Emily Dickinson from these other poets is the breadth of her representations of bees. Dickinson’s use of bees lends itself to discussion of a remarkably rich array of themes: gender and sexuality, class and race, scientific and ecological discourse, religion, and aesthetics (and no doubt many more). Reflecting on this symbolic density, our discussion will chart points of congruity and incongruity between Dickinson’s changeable bees.
About the Facilitator
Claire Nashar is a scholar, translator, editor, and poet. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Buffalo (SUNY), supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Winner of an Excellence in Teaching Award, she has published two books of poems, Lake (2016) and Handmade (2015) and a number of interviews, translations, poems, and critical essays. She edited a special issue of Formes Poétiques Contemporaines and is at work on a book-length translation of Louis Aragon’s Le Fou d’Elsa (1963). Nashar served as curator of the online Australian Poetry Library and as Assistant Project Editor and Manager for the Marianne Moore Digital Archive.
Questions? write edmprograms@emilydickinsonmuseum.org