Friends stretch one’s boundaries in delightful ways. Imagine my surprise and excitement when my friend Lynn, who lives mere steps from the cultural capital of our country, sent me a CD so that I, too, could experience a bit of the dazzlement she and her husband experiencedi at a live performance at Carnegie Hall of this stunning new opera: EMILY No Prisoner Be. Lynn and Michael are much more conversant that I in all things musical and instrumental, and they, like the rest of the enthralled audience that evening, rose to give this genre-defying celebration of twenty-six of Dickinson’s poems. Reviews of this soaring performance include photographs of the set and mention that Dickinson’s life and work are a favorite of composers, as of readers. There is certainly no one way to read a poem, to sing a song, or to frame and understand a life. That is part of the thrill.
Although I have already shared a post and a poem this April inspired by Dickinson, I have wanted to share my first encounter with this masterful homage by sonic artists almost beyond my ken, and to give it its own space.
For some inexplicable reason, perhaps because I just finished an attentive rereading of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence this morning, the set for this opera–and the audacity of reinterpretation in general–reminded me of this sculpture I encountered last September in the grounds at The Mount, the house designed and built by Wharton in Lenox, Massachussetts in 1902. Perhaps both sculpture and sculpted sound are aligned in my mind because of the way they each give what could be ephemeral more weight and also more sense of flight?
Context for Poem “Hourglass”:
Today’s pre-dawn perambultions drawn from reading and wondering made me think of the Hourglass Spider. Was there such a thing? Yes. They are rare and wonderful, but impossible for me to describe in a short poem. And so I pulled back, pondered the shape, function, and metaphorical echoes of the actual archaic timepiece of the hourglass, and attempted to capture these in today’s poem.
I had also been wanting to share word of the astonishing opera mentioned above, and thought Emily Dickinson might approve of the pairing.
Until tomorrow,
LESLIE