Just watched the first show of Dickinson. There are 20 episodes.
I happen to be reading her poems. I like "Imps in eager caucus/ Raffle for my soul."
In the first episode, she's spurning marriage, she gets published, she makes out with Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, and her father falls asleep in her bed.
I don't know who Hailee Steinfeld is. She was in that terrible version of Ender's Game. She seems good as Emily. Ella Hunt is Sue Gilbert, who writes poetry too. I love Jane Krakowski. Hard to imagine her in that time, but they play music that is anachronistic and other things.
The guests like Thoreau and LM Alcott are played as exaggerations of perhaps their smallness. It's only Olmstead that seems helpful, even if he's odd. Alcott is in it only for the money, and likes to hike up her dress and run across fields.
I have a friend in the art world, ex-friend if you want to be exact, he slept with my ex-wife and has avoided me. Anyway, one time he took us around Soho, showing us what he considered the best art. And one place was an outsider art gallery. I became bewitched by the idea, and folk art. I've always thought of outsider art as a visual category, but I wonder if there's a literature outsider art list. Google really has changed my consciousness, I can gratify my curiosity in a way--not complete, not everything is on the internet, but it's a place to start. Anyway, I'd say Dickinson was an outsider artist. Yes, she read Wordsworth, but she was perhaps too timid to accept fame and exposure of her art. She was such a delicate flower. Another book that comes to mind is A Confederacy of Dunces. When I google "list of authors who works were published only after their death" I get lists of people who became famous after their deaths. That is not true outsider art, but maybe adjacent adjacent.
Is fanfiction outsider art? I read the Wikipedia article for Sheenagh Pugh, where supposedly she wrote a book on fanfiction, considering it a legitimate genera.
The show is ahistorical. It has hip hop music and dance, 21st century concepts and ideas, and at times seems to make Dickenson part of the Beat movement. I'm OK with it, because it's entertaining and I say to myself, "that isn't historical." It's a odd mashup. Katy Waldman writes, "“Dickinson” is, in a profound sense, about navigating these gaps between how things were and how we wish they’d been."
In my two years reading Shakespeare, I came to the conclusion that biography was irrelevant to the art, in part because we know so little about Shakespeare and you can't really infer much about his life from the writing. This show is all about inferring a deeply personal interpretation on Dickinson's life.
"It also thrums with anxiety. Smith has been accused of remaking history; her show, in which Massachusetts élites befriend Black characters and revel in Black culture, risks falsifying the past." And, "Smith’s show wonders: can we make of our inheritance something elastic, elegant, useful?"
The above quote was from New Yorker article by Katy Waldman about the show (and how Alfred Habegger's biography played a part in Alena Smith's dramatic presentation of Dickinson). "To read Dickinson is to understand how a consciousness—in Shock—can produce odd swerves, haunted incantations, even dry jokes. To watch “Dickinson” is to experience that revelation via zombie boyfriends and the blurring of time."
Her writing on little scraps of paper is interesting too. Did they not have paper in those days? Or would she have written that way today too?
Each episode features a poem, here is the one from the first episode. Death is an actual character in the show, played by Wiz Khalifa.
Because I could not stop for death:
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –
Links:
Emily Dickinson Museum (Website) (Wikipedia)
Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert (Brain Pickings)
10 best poems (Publishers Weekly)
15 Best (Readsy)
People Like to Tattoo her poems on them
People Links (Wikipedia)
Otis Lord Visited her in her 40's.
Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson Sister-in-law
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