Plan Your Weekend: My Emily Dickinson Series Continues
Posted in Emily Dickinson, Exhibitions, Programs and Events on May 21 2010, by Plant Talk
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Rob Casper is Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America. |
The New York Botanical Garden is in the midst of its exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers, and the Poetry Society of America couldn’t be more excited!
We’ve already had a great pre-launch during Poem in Your Pocket day (covered in this week’s “Talk of the Town” section in The New Yorker), with Mayor Bloomberg, Sigourney Weaver, and New York’s State Poet Jean Valentine. And our first My Emily Dickinson readings featured former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins (pictured), award-winning poet Marie Ponsot, and Dickinson biographer Brenda Wineapple. There’s plenty to come, too, with readings and talks at the Garden by Bowery Poetry Club founder Bob Holman (May 22), scholar Christopher Benfey (June 4), poet and writer Joyce Carol Oates (June 12), former Queens Poet Laureate Stephen Stepanchev (June 12), and others, as well as corollary programs at the Belmont Public Library with a host of younger poets—including Mark Levine (May 27), Catherine Barnett (June 7), and Ada Limon (June 10)—reading from and speaking about the Belle of Amherst. Finally, the exhibition at the Garden will end with a weekend marathon reading of specific themes within Dickinson’s work, for which Garden visitors can sign up to participate in!
All of this shows how poets and poetry lovers of all stripes connect to Dickinson’s work. But we at the Poetry Society of America are also proud of the ways the exhibit shows off Dickinson’s horticultural expertise as well as her celebration of the flora in both her backyard and her imagination.
We are especially proud of the signage in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory that showcases segments of Dickinson’s poems alongside descriptions of various displayed foliage and its importance to Dickinson. The grounds of the Garden also contain signs of poems in particularly apt spots, with audio commentary on the poems by Poetry Society of America Executive Director Alice Quinn, among others. It’s a powerful way to experience how poetry engages with and re-frames the world before us.
