A Select Society

I have a few updates today concerning some recent posts, but then my “daily” Dickinson posts over the next few days will be a bit sporadic. One daughter is here visiting from LA, and we’ll be busy with various activities and day trips; plus, we have planned trips coming up to Richmond and Baltimore. Therefore, I might get a post in here and there in the coming days, but nothing consistent until June 14. Regarding the updates:

1. AND THEN THIS HAPPENED, 5.21.2026: I met poet Calvin Forbes while at O’Hare. The post about that close encounter of a poetic kind is HERE. I’d mentioned that I’d ordered one of his books, and it arrived. The book is stamped “TOLEDO LUCAS COUNTY LIBRARY.” Hmm...I hope there are no outstanding late fees associated with this book!

I discussed one of Forbes' poems, "The Card Players," HERE.

2. ZUIGERPHOBIA IS REAL, 5.11.2026:

Near the Ides of May, I wrote of the dangers of vacuuming and other household chores. The post is HERE. Within the article, I mentioned a news item from The Baltimore Sun from April 1950 with details about a woman's death (by electrocution) while vacuuming. I found the article online; however, I could not access it without a paid subscription. A friend tried to help by searching the Library of Congress' "Chronicling America," a collection of historic American newspapers. Alas, the collection does not seem to include The Baltimore Sun. However, she did find this from The Evening Star.

Keep cleaning, dear readers, but hey -- be careful out there! 3. THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT (PART 4), 5.29.2026 In a four-post series on short poetry, which included information on the short poems and word art of Aram Saroyan, Richard Hell, and others, I included a few of my own attempts at clever word play. The post from May 29, HERE, includes a dozen of my creations. Below are a few more.

4. SINK YOUR TEETH INTO THIS, 6.1.2026

Yesterday's post, HERE, covered a variety of topics, including butterflies, mathematics, toothpaste, collocations (yes, collocations), and grammar. That bit on grammar made me wonder if Dickinson ever used the word "grammar" in any of her poems. The answer -- no. However, she did use the word "syntax" in one poem, so I'll provide the details on that in a future post. BTW: "Mathematics" shows up in three poems.

My brother is a nature photographer. More specifically, he’s a butterfly photographer, but he also snaps pics of birds, bugs, squirrels, and more. In a recent email from him, he said this:

Here’s what’s new with me: a Hackberry Emperor Butterfly. I had never seen one before yesterday, May 28, 2026. In fact, I didn’t know such a thing existed. I had never heard of it, and yet there it was staring back at me from a leaf as I took these photographs. My car needed an oil change and a safety inspection which brought me in the vicinity of the “butterfly trail” that I occasionally visit. That trail never lets me down. Not only because of the Hackberry Emperor, but I also saw my first Monarch sighting of the season. As I was leaving the trail I saw it touch down on a Common Milkweed plant and I believe it was laying eggs. I only managed two partial pictures before it flew on in search of other milkweed plants. So, they are in the area! As for the Garden, it is beginning to blossom now that we have some sunshine. I predict butterflies in our future. What’s new with you?

What’s new with me? Collocations. I had never seen the word before yesterday, May 31, 2026. In fact, I didn’t know such a thing existed. I had never heard of it, and yet there it was staring back at me from a webpage as I explored something to do with Dickinson. LOL – I don’t even remember what I had typed into the search field to land on “collocations.” Is the term new to you too? Here’s info from an entry in Wikipedia:

“A collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.”

And check out this info:

“There are about seven main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns), noun + verb, verb + noun, adverb + adjective, verbs + prepositional phrase (phrasal verbs), and verb + adverb.”

Let me pause here for just a moment and toss out a few questions: How well do you know grammar? How important is it to know grammar? Should grammar be taught in schools? Well, first of all – in a nutshell – our system of grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, it describes how we use language; it does not prescribe how we should use language. And you know – or at least your brain knows – grammar sufficiently if not skillfully or expertly. If your brain did not understand the rules of grammar, you would find it very difficult to communicate. When you speak, though, you don’t pre-plan each and every subject and each and every predicate. You don’t stop to think about verb tense or agreement. You don’t map out the order of modifying adjectives for a noun. It just happens. Maybe you think you don’t know and understand grammar, but your brain does. Yes, you – as we all do – might fumble with an occasional its/it’s, a who/whom, a dangling participle, or a whole host of other common grammatical missteps; however, overall, you know grammar – just like you know how to drive a car. You might not have a mechanic’s comprehensive knowledge on how the vehicle operates and/or what to do if there’s a breakdown, but you know how to get in, buckle up, start the engine and get from point A to point Z. Where am I going with this? LOL – I’m not sure. After stumbling upon the word “collocation” and reading about it, my plan was to examine common collocations, find examples of said familiar collocations used by Dickinson, and explore how she might have added a poet’s twist of inventiveness or inspiration to various “compositional phrasemes.” It seemed to fit in with what I’ve been writing about over the past few days, a poet’s mission (as expressed by poet Ocean Vuong): “We’re out here to write sentences the species has never encountered.” And then, when attempting to find common collocations, I saw this:

YIKES! I’m more a grammar person than a math person, and after staring blankly at that formula for much longer than I should have, I decided to pause my delve into collocations and careen completely off course:

Yesterday, I visited a drug store to purchase a tube of toothpaste. I could not get over how many options there were. There must have been at least ten brands to choose from, plus they each had options for mint or cinnamon, paste or gel, and single, double or triple packs. I also had to decide on cavity protection, whitening therapy, extra whitening, “maxfresh,” gum health, pro-health, sensitivity protection, whole mouth protection, ultra flavor blast, cooling crystals, and more.

Very quickly, I accessed my “Notes” app on my phone and set up a mathematic formula to work through all of the variables with “x” being the brand & type of toothpaste I would settle on (or, for all the grammar pedants out there: "on which I would settle"):

LOL – no, for this type of problem, I actually remembered that the formula would go something like this: 10 brands x 2 flavors x 2 consistencies x 10 features – or at least 400 available options to choose from to clean my Pearly Whites.

Ohhhh , by the way, “pearly whites” is a very common English collocation – AND – “pearl white” is a butterfly found along the north-eastern coast of Australia. I don’t think my brother has a pic of one of those.

Yesterday’s post included a homework assignment. Were you able to finish it?

In response to an excerpt from a podcaster’s interview with poet Ocean Vuong, I shared a poem by Dickinson, “As imperceptibly as Grief”; however, I purposefully left off the last line. You were to compose a final line for the poem, but not just any line – one that our “species has never encountered.”

Here’s the background: Vuong once handed a professor one of his poems; the prof scanned it and said, “You see that line you wrote?” He typed it into Google for a search. As the results popped up, he acknowledged, “It’s a decent line, but 300,000 people beat you to it.” He hit the point home with, “We’re out here to write sentences the species has never encountered.” So how did you conclude Dickinson’s poem?

Of course, on the surface, the gist of the poem is the transition of Summer into Autumn. In the final lines, the season – “without a Wing / Or service of a Keel” – makes its escape…? But escapes how? Where? Why? What should the final line say? I will point out that the poem has a very loose rhyme scheme, so there’s no pressure to compose a final line with a perfect rhyme. The alternate even lines have various types of slant rhymes – some concentrated on a vowel or consonant sound. The “rhymes” throughout the poem are “away”/”Perfidy,” “begun”/”Afternoon,” “shone”/”gone” – and “keel” with whatever we might end the poem. I suspect an easy way to conclude the work would be to explain to where the Summer escaped – so how about “into the autumn’s veil.” “Veil” hints at the colors of fall, and it “rhymes” in similar fashion the rest of the poem with “keel.”

And thus, without a wing, Or service of a keel, Our summer made her light escape Into the autumn’s veil.

That seems pretty cliché, though, no? Let’s see, how about concluding the poem with, “As winds of change exhaled.” While I like the inclusion of the wind, a favorite weather phenomenon of Dickinson’s (a search for “wind” on the online archive generates 172 entries), this image, more so than my first, is rather hackneyed.

And thus, without a wing, Or service of a keel, Our summer made her light escape As winds of change exhaled.

What do you think of “Bound for Eternity”? Well, it’s definitely been done before – even by Dickinson herself in “Because I could not stop for Death” – and it certainly fits better in that poem with the carriage and horses. Also, “Eternity” spoils what’s going on with the poem’s rhyme scheme -- and the term seems too obligatory for a 19th century poem.

And thus, without a wing, Or service of a keel, Our summer made her light escape Bound for Eternity.

I suppose I could keep on trying, but I don’t believe I’d come up with anything better than what Dickinson wrote. So how did Summer make her light escape in Dickinson’s poem?

And thus, without a wing, Or service of a keel, Our summer made her light escape Into the beautiful.

It’s a beautiful poem with a beautiful ending. I wrote about this poem last December, HERE, and said this:

In yesterday’s post, the final in a series about short poems, I included a portion of an interview with poet Ocean Vuong.  He shared an anecdote of when he handed one of his poems to a teacher/mentor, and the prof’s response was – in the words of the interviewer – “a punch in the face.”  Here’s what Vuong said:

“I gave him a poem, he’s like ‘but I’ll show you – I want to do something – I’m going to show you.’ And he turns around, he’s typing into Google, and he says, ‘you see that line you wrote? It’s a decent line, but 300,000 people beat you to it.’”

The lesson from the prof – in Vuong’s words:  “We’re out here to write sentences the species has never encountered.” Oddly enough, that statement made me think of one specific poem by Dickinson, one I’ve been playing around with as I set it to music for an annual ED birthday celebration concert that a friend of mine and I present each December (this year’s concert will be the “fourth annual”).  The poem:  “As imperceptibly as Grief.” It’s shown below without its final line.  I’ll explain momentarily why I’ve omitted it.

First, there is so much I love about this poem: the “distilled” quietness “as Twilight long begun” as fall approaches; the image of Nature “sequestering” herself in the afternoon – as the “Dusk drew earlier in”; the “foreign” look of the Morning as a courteous “Guest that would be gone.”  Then – without wing or the service of a keel – the Summer made her “light escape”  (and that multi-layered use of the word “light” – **chef’s kiss** ).   And then…   Here comes that final line that I omitted, and I removed it so that we could complete an experiment a la Ocean Vuong’s story.   Pretend you’ve written the poem.  Imagine you’re about to hand a copy to your professor.  However, you’ve completed the poem, the final line is there, and you’ve attempted to conclude the work with a line “the species has never encountered.”   What did you write?  How did you end the poem?

PART 1 OF THIS SERIES IS HERE. PART 2 IS HERE, AND PART 3 IS HERE.

I’ve been publishing a series of posts on short poetry (though not on short forms of poetry, like haiku), and I have a few things to wrap up.

OTHER SHORT POEMS: My posts have mainly focused on Aram Saroyan’s “m,” J. W. Curry’s single-letter poem of the lower-case “i,” and word art created by Richard Hell and others; however, there are other well-known short poems. One, by Strickland Gillilan, entitled “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes,” is often referred to as “Fleas.” Here is the complete poem:

Adam Had ’em. Another well-known two-word poem was composed by boxer Muhammad Ali. In June 1975, after giving a speech at Harvard University, Ali was discussing poetry on stage with journalist George Plimpton. When asked for the shortest poem of all time, Plimpton recited Gillilan’s poem above, and Ali responded, "I’ve got one: Me? Whee!!” All of these poems and more are discussed in this video on short poetry, HERE, in which the vlogger asks, “But what counts as poetry?” – a la Helen Vendler’s comment about a three-line poem by Dickinson, “such a short poem raises the question of what counts as a poem at all,” the impetus for this series of posts. Oddly enough, the vlogger linked above recorded his comments about short poems from a hotel room in Charlottesville, VA, where I live – AND – I believe he’s in the hotel in town where I used to work as the Director of Human Resources. How weird is that? LOBSTEE: In Part 2 of this series, I shared an excerpt from Richard Hell and Christopher Wool’s book Psychopts: “Lobstee.” Later, I found a review on that opus from blogger Zane Koss, who wrote this reflection on discussing the work with his students in an entry entitled, “A poem or book you like to teach”:

“We typically talk about the lobster/lobstee relationship as parallel to employer/employee, which then leads to the question of what exactly it means ‘to lobst’ – the activity of a lobst-er.”

Koss also added this:

“Once, a student pointed out that it was a key stroke error, that the ‘e’ and ‘r’ are beside each other on the standard QWERTY keyboard, which opened onto a conversation about how this poem was likely composed on a typewriter and how we can talk about the ways in which the technology of writing changes how and what we write. It’s a lovely poem to talk about with students!”

BEING THE “FIRST”: In past posts I’ve shared Ezra Pound’s short poem “In a Station of the Metro,” the work that is said to be the origin of imagism and verbless poetry. Aram Saroyan’s “m” is credited as being the first one-letter poem. “Firsts” like these – and other “firsts” in art, music, and other creative media – called to mind comments I heard recently in an excerpt from an interview with poet Ocean Vuong (HERE). He shared an anecdote of when he handed something he’d written to a professor:

“I gave him a poem, he’s like ‘but I’ll show you – I want to do something – I’m going to show you.’ And he turns around, he’s typing into Google, and he says, ‘you see that line you wrote? It’s a decent line, but 300,000 people beat you to it.’”

It truly is very rare for any individual to be the “first” to write or film or choreograph or compose or paint or sculpt something original – the first to write a verbless poem, the first to pen a two-word, the first to publish a single-letter poem, the first to pepper poems with dashes and rhyme “glow” with “now.” When something truly unique or different is created, it sets the stage for what comes next. Saroyan’s “m,” as ludicrous as it seems, was a “first” (think Marcel Duchamp as R. Mutt and his porcelain urinal). WORD ART: Finally, this investigation into short poems and word art inspired me to try my own hand it. Below are some of the results of my endeavors. First, I believe I have written a poem even shorter than Saroyan’s “m.” I have entitled it “Era,” and instead of one word, it is comprised of one punctuation mark, a period. This, what I believe now to be the shortest poem ever written, is presented for the first time ever:

Others of my one and two word poems:

​Left: “Forever Is Composed of Nows – and Thens” Center: “Six Degrees of Separation” (or “Loss of Humanity”) Right: “Type-A Typo”

Left: "The Evolution of Humankind" Center: Summer in the Age of Global Warming Right:  "Home on the Range"

Below: "Free Verse (for Some)" or "Chocolate Is Available at Our Separate but Equal Location"

Finally, I believe I have created a FIRST -- a form of poetry even more minimal than the most minimal of poems. I call it "invisible poems"– no words, numbers, symbols, or marks of any kind. Two of my invisible poems are below.

Left: This no-word poem reads “Is it Pronounced ‘De-mock-racy,’ ‘Dumb-ocracy,’ or ‘Dim-ocracy’?” Right: This no-word poem reads, “White Privilege Run Amok (or What Happens When Red Rots)"

Two more late-entries of Word Art which I made today: Left: "Not So 'UNITED' with a Shift to the Right" Right: "Trump's Healthcare Plan Promised as of Day 1"

PART 1 OF THIS SERIES IS HERE.

PART 2 OF THIS SERIES IS HERE.

Based on a comment by Helen Vendler in her book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries, I started a series of posts on short poems (aside from short poetic forms like haiku). Part 1, inspired by a three-line poem by Dickinson, and part 2, on what is said to be the shortest poem in the world (by Aram Saroyan), are linked above. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I had a few loose ends to knot up, starting with a funny story about lobstee – er, lobster. Here’s the lowdown: My wife and I were visiting the Atlantic coast of New Hampshire, the state with the least amount of coastline of any US state at just 13 miles, and as many do when visiting New England, we thought we’d have seafood for dinner. At the ocean-side restaurant, I perused the menu and figured that at least one of us would order lobster (likely my wife since I prefer crab). The menu, of course, ballyhooed their lobster, and within all the printed fanfare, it said “half or whole.” When the server arrived to take our order, she asked if we had any questions. I inquired about the lobster. “If I order half, which half do I get?” She. Just. Cackled. She hollered for all of the other servers and bussers to come over to our table. “He asked which half of the lobster he’d get,” she hooted. Before long, I was surrounded by a chorus of roaring New Hampshirites. Evidently, “half or whole” refers to a pound (or half) of lobster.

My second loose end relates to my two-degrees-of-separation involving punk rocker Richard Hell, who co-published a book of word-art with Christopher Wool. “Who the hell is Richard Hell?” I asked myself yesterday, and at dinner that night, as I told my wife about my shallow-dive into short works of poetry, Saroyan’s “m,” and Richard Hell’s word art in “Psychopts,” she said flatly, “We know Richard Hell,” as she finished ladling out a bowl of homemade minestrone soup. Say whaaaat??? I knew I knew the name, but what the hell (pun intended) was the connection? She reminded me that one of my college professor’s son had changed his name to Richard Hell. Oooohhhh yeah. Could this Richard Hell be one and the same? Hell yeah! We googled it to be sure. ​Richard Hell, born Richard Lester Meyers, was the son of Carolyn H. Rhodes – not only a professor of some of my undergraduate English lit & poetry courses, but my academic advisor! Whop bop b-luma b-lop bam bom!

Above: SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (working backwards from Emily Dickinson): On March 13, I wrote about Dickinson's poem "In the name of the Bee" and mentioned a podcast by Christopher Lydon >>> The podcast was of an interview with Helen Vendler about her book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries >>> Based on comments by Vendler on short poems, I began this series of posts and shared Aram Saroyan's single letter poem, "m" >>> As part of the post on "m," I explored word art by Richard Hell >>> Richard Hell was the son of college professor Carolyn H. Rhodes >>> Rhoades was my academic advisor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA.

Thirdly, I promised to share an additional poem as short as “m,” and there is one by J. W. Curry composed of a lower-case i with his thumbprint as the dot – making this “i” uniquely own.

Speaking of “i,” I concluded yesterday’s post with Tom Snarsky’s comments and my responses on Saroyan’s “m.” Snarsky followed his list of observations with this statement:

“The above list is just a jumping-off point. You may have seen something completely different in the piece. When you look at ‘m,’ what do you see?”

I added, “There is one more thing. I'll include that with my list of loose ends tomorrow.”

Well, I mentioned earlier that I’d reviewed my post from yesterday with my wife that night, and I showed her Saroyan’s poem “m” to get her reaction. It was not favorable, but she humored me while I recounted Snarsky’s comments and my responses. Just as I finished up and turned my screen’s view of “m-with-the-extra-leg” away from her, she said, “I see ‘I am.’” Say what? “I see ‘I am.’” I looked at “m” again. Okay, I could envisage what she was describing, so I tried to refashion Saroyan’s “m” as “i am” with the Playbill font – both with a capital I (below on the left) and a lower-case I, sans dot (below on the right). I did so by trying to match the size and position of the serif blocks on the bottoms of the two letters:

The results? Well, my experiment didn’t quite work – but I could visualize what she saw in the – dare I say – poem. TBH, as single word/word art poetry goes, some merger of “m” with “i’m” a la Cummings or Curry would work better for me than just an “m” with an extra leg.

Finally, I promised yesterday that today I would share “more (and better) examples of word art.”

Oddly enough, a few days before I even knew I’d be publishing a series of posts on short poems, I saw an Insta Reels uploaded by @CallItDesignCo, and I emailed it to myself. I knew I’d share it in the coming days, and lo and behold, it fits perfectly with these recent posts on word art. The post includes nine slides with word art, the work of Austrian artist @AnatolKnotek, and you’ll know immediately upon viewing it why I saved the link. The opening slide shows an oddly expanded version of the words “THE POEM.” Upon close examination, though, I realized that it had actually said, “THE PROBLEM”; however, the letters R, B, and L had fallen by the wayside to create “THE P O EM.”

I was hooked immediately. Others I loved are the following:

The complete Reels is HERE.

Also, I have for years enjoyed the word art of Scott Kim.

Below: Turn the "art" poster upside down, and it becomes quote by Pablo Picasso: Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth; “Mathematics” can be read upright or upside-down; a circular “Infinity.” Much more of Kim’s word art is HERE.

I ​ gotta say, I think these examples exceed Saroyan’s and Hell’s word art in both cleverness, depth, ad complexity. What do you think?

PART 1 OF THIS SERIES IS HERE.

Yesterday I began a series of posts on short poems. My investigation began after reading Helen Vendler’s analysis of Dickinson’s “In the name of the Bee,” three lines thought by early editors to be too short to be a poem. In her commentary, Vendler wrote, “such a short poem raises the question of what counts as a poem at all.”  Thus began my investigation into short poems, and wait until you see what I have to share today, a poem of which the Poetry Foundation writes, “it’s said to be one of the shortest published poems in the world.”

Are you ready for this?  

**drum roll** (albeit a very brief one  – if not a rim shot)

The poem which, for a time, the Guinness Book of World Records listed as the shortest poem ever written is “m” by Aram Saroyan.  The poem is depicted below:

The Poetry Foundation’s discussion of the poem posted by Tom Snarsky states this:

When you look at this poem, what do you see? Before you read further, take a moment and really look at it...Study it as closely as you can. Try not to worry too much about the expectations or associations that might come with calling this piece a 'poem' and give yourself a moment just to reckon with what your eye actually takes in. What do you notice? What do you wonder?

Let me pause for a moment while you gaze at "m."

“Looking at a poem in this way, rather than reading it, may seem strange,” states Snarsky  “This process, though, is part of Saroyan’s intention for an ‘instant’ poem like ‘m.’”

Sooo…what do you think?

**sigh** I’m not one who’s quick to criticize another’s creativity, but “m” as a poem?  I’m just not puttin’ gravy on what they’re servin'.

Snarsky's article continues:

“This kind of seeing invites the reader to be a creative viewer, and to engage in the poem as an equal participant with the writer. ‘m’ does not make sense in the same way a sentence does, or even a single word, but it still admits many different ways of being seen.”

Let’s me repeat that, but this time with a few of the words changed:

“This kind of seeing invites the OBSERVER to be a creative viewer, and to engage in the IMAGE as an equal participant with the ARTIST. ‘m’ does not make sense in the same way a sentence does, or even a single word, but it still admits many different ways of being seen.”

To me, Saroayan’s “m” is more a work of visual art (albeit, an amateurish one) than poem.  To be honest, most of what is written on the Poetry Foundation’s site about “m” suggests the same thing – even their recommendation to consider the negative space.  

The PF site even includes this quote from Sayoran himself: 

“It doesn’t have a reading process [...] Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once.”

Let me let that sink in: “It doesn’t have a reading process.”  Let me say that a bit louder for the people in the back  “IT DOESN’T HAVE A READING PROCESS.”

If it doesn’t have a reading process, then….  Well, let me move on.

I also spied on the Foundation’s site that their source for “m” was Saroyan’s “Complete Minimal Poems” from Ugly Duckling Press.  You know I looked it up.  First, the book is out of stock.  Hmm…I wonder how many copies were sold?  Second, there is a link on which to “read” an excerpt – and of course I clicked on that too.  The one and only excerpt?  “Lobstee.” (Pictured below.) I’m not making this up. Third, even UdP’s website includes this testimonial:  "Anyone interested in art made from words should have it."   Did you pick up on the fact that it said “ART”...not poetry? 

The endorsement quoted above (about those interested in art) was furnished by none other than Richard Hell, which begged the question, “Who the hell is Richard Hell?” – and why did that name sound so familiar to me? OMG – I’ll get to that tomorrow – and wait until you hear!  I almost fell out of my chair.

Anyway, according to the Poetry Foundation, Hell collaborated with artist Christopher Wool on a book of image-texts called Psychopts. Sample pages from Psychopts were available via a link I found -- I've posted some below -- and I have to say, most of them seemed a bit juvenile.  LOL – I used to be a middle-school principal, so I’m an expert at puerile art.

Okay, let me pause here for now, but I have many loose ends to tie up tomorrow:

I have a funny “lobstee” …er, “lobster” story.

I will reveal "two degrees of separation" between Richard Hell and me.

I will follow up on this  If “m” is said to be “one of the shortest published poems in the world,” what other poems are just as short?  Or shorter?

I'll post more (and better) examples of word art.

I’ll close today’s post with the Poetry Foundation commentator Tom Snarsky’s inventory of “things I see in this poem” regarding Saroyan’s “m” (below on the left) -- along with my comments (on the right):

Following his inventory, Snarsky states, "The above list is just a jumping-off point. You may have seen something completely different in the piece. When you look at 'm,' what do you see?"

This post might end up being quite lengthy, which is rather ironic. Here’s the long and short of it: I’m going to explore short poetry, and wait till you see what I’ve uncovered. The fact of the matter is, I suspect I will have more to share than my average post length, so I believe I could end up with a Part 2 to this Part 1. Who knows – maybe even a Part 3? My investigation began after reading Helen Vendler’s analysis of Dickinson’s “In the name of the bee,” three lines thought by early editors to be too short to be a poem. As a result, the work was tacked onto the lines of two other poems to become, in Vendler’s words, a “compound assembly.” I wrote about the three separate poems just yesterday, HERE. In her commentary, Vendler wrote, “in fact such a short poem raises the question of what counts as a poem at all.” Using the three-line work as an example, Vendler speculated, “we could say that what a poem needs above all is imagination. In this tiny poem we see a first, second, third, and fourth effort of imagination.” Before I specify Vendler’s evidentiary foursome for “In the name of the Bee,” let me repeat again Vendler’s “above all” need for a poem to be a poem: inagmination. We’re going to need more than a bit of imagination for what I’ve come across in my exploration of short poems. But – I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me push on with Vendler’s tetrad. First: “The poet invents the idea of a parody of a Christian form of words.” Second: “The poet decides on the three nouns to be substituted for teh three Persons of the Trinity.” Third: “The poet has to make her trinity of nouns ‘mean something’ in relation to one another.” Fourth: “The nouns chosen must have a ‘spiritual’ quality, must be symbolic as well as ‘real.’” Vendler offers more. This is just a bare-bones summary of her remarks and for her initial query, “what counts as a poem at all.”

I’ve written about short poems before. The three that immediately popped into my mind were the following (and all definitely meet the criteria of having to deal with imagination):

​E. E. Cummings: l(a

This poem – one of my favorites – is so clever, and I’ve written about it many times. One such post is HERE.

​William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrrow

I’ve also written about this oft-debated poem many times. One instance is HERE.

Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Metro

I haven’t discussed this poem in detail, thought to be the origin of imagism and verbless poetry, but I have mentioned it a couple of times. One post where I did cite the poem is HERE (toward the bottom of the page):

Based on Vendler’s remarks, I did further exploration into short poetry – above and beyond types of short works like haiku. I’ll report on some of that tomorrow, and in short – you won’t believe what I came across. For now, I’ll close with this:

Back on May 13, I wrote about a podcast I’d discovered – well, actually a webpage about a podcast because the page with the actual audio file was missing – and the info on the page centered on a discussion between media host Christopher Lydon and professor and literary critic Helen Vendler.  Lydon had interviewed Vendler on her book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries. The page I’d found included a bit of their exchange on a three-line poem by Dickinson, “In the name of the bee.”  My post about it is HERE.

I ended up ordering Vendler’s book before flying off to Chicago for the weekend, and I started reading it on my flight.  The first of 150 poems she discusses is “In the name of the bee,” and of this poem, Vendler said this:

“Dickinson’s first editors thought that this short invocation couldn’t be a complete poem.  Making one poem out of three poems transcribed by Dickinson on a single page, they tacked this little tercet onto the end of their compound assembly.”

However, Vendler doesn’t mention the other two poems of the “assembly.”  What works did first editors Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson combine to create a single poem?

I checked and found the three lines of “In the name of the bee” in the second series of Dickinson’s Poems as the benediction to a poem Todd titled “Summer’s Obsequies.”  The other two poems are “The Gentian weaves her fringes” and “A brief, but patient illness.”  To be fair to Todd and Higginson, I can understand how and why they interpreted the three creations as one.  Take a look at the manuscript, the three appear as one.

Thomas Johnson included the three as one in his 1955 compilation, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, poem #18. However, R. W. Franklin separated the poems in his 1998 edition The Poems of Emily Dickinson, poems numbered 21, 22, and 23. Cristanne Miller noted the following in her 2016 volume, Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them:

“THJ regards the first three poems of F1 (Fascicle 1) as a single poem because they are separated by white space, not a drawn line. RWF prints three poems.”

Miller also presents the three as separate poems.

Back to Vendler’s comment about "In the name of the Bee": “Dickinson’s first editors thought that this short invocation couldn’t be a complete poem.” She added, “And in fact such a short poem raises the question of what counts as a poem at all.”

Early last week, I started a series of posts on Helen Vendler’s Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries, and I promised to share info on two of Vendler’s studies that focused on Dickinson’s effective use of rhyme. In yesterday’s post, I discussed Vendler’s analysis of “The morns are meeker than they were” and why the poet rhymed “brown,” “town,” and “gown” (from lines 2, 4, and 6) with “on” (at the end of line 8). Today I have details on the second poem, “These are the days when Birds come back,” and like yesterday’s, today's post focuses on the structure of the poem as related to its rhyme scheme.

Very succinctly, Vendler summarizes the poem with this:

“The poem goes in and out of direct address to its ‘Indian Summer’ (the title the first editors gave it). Dickinson addresses the season as ‘Oh fraud,’ ‘Oh sacrament,’ and ‘Oh Last Communion’ – epithets summing up in brief the evolving course of her feelings.”

Of its form, Vendler adds this:

“Although the poem was cast, in all of Dickinson’s fair copies, into six stanzas, its rhyme shapes it into three parts, rhyming (except for lines one and two) aabccb…two tetrameter couplets, each followed by a trimeter which binds, by its rhyme, every two stanzas together, making three double stanzas."

There is much more to her summary, but she wraps up her commentary with this incredible breakdown of the work’s structure:

“Why does Dickinson make her six-stanza poem also a three-part one (by rhyme) and a two-part one (turning on the hinge-word ‘Till’)? The six stanza shape represents the six temporal segments of her evolving plot, from ‘These are the days’ to a ‘last Communion”; the three rhyming-units (introduced by ‘These are’; ‘Oh fraud’; and ‘Oh Sacrament’) track her emotional changes from objectivity through resentment to yearning; and the solemn binary shape, divided by the ‘Till’ to which the seeds bear reliable witness, leads us to – and from -- the cusp where the balm of Indian Summer returns to the ‘altered air’ of true autumn . . . so that we are here reading three poems at once: a poem of six parts, another of three parts, and another of two parts.”

By the way, Vendler notes of this poem, “Because Dickinson does not repeat this strategy, the form remains unique.”

Below left: The poem as three parts of two stanzas. Below right: The poem as two parts of three stanzas.

A few days ago, I started writing about Helen Vendler’s book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries. I’d mentioned that I found her in-depth analyses interesting, particularly her thoughts on how Dickinson’s structures augmented her poems’ themes. I’d mentioned that I’d share two examples in the coming days, but then I got sidetracked with two pieces I wrote following a chance encounter with American poet Calvin Forbes at O’Hare Airport this past Monday. For now, back to Vendler with the first of the two examples, the lesser complicated one of the two.

To set the stage for this initial case, though, involving “The morns are meeker than they were,” let me first provide a bit of background involving an entirely different poem, “An altered look about the hills,” a poem Mabel Loomis Todd included in the second series of Poems by Dickinson she published in 1891. Take a look at lines 3 and 4. Dickinson wrote them as follows:

A wider sunrise in the morn – A deeper twilight on the lawn –

To provide a perfect rhyme – to make the poem more palatable for Victorian tastes – Todd changed the lines to read as follows:

A wider sunrise in the dawn; A deeper twilight on the lawn;

Of course, Dickinson knew that “dawn” rhymed with “lawn. If she had wanted “dawn,” she would have written “dawn.” However, it is completely clear by her own handwriting that she intended for the word at the end of line 3 to be “morn.”

“Why did Dickinson prefer ‘morn’?” you ask.  At this point, I’ll just assume a role as parent and say, “Because I said so.” My point this morning is not to debate “dawn” vs. “morn.”  Instead, I’m just laying a bit of groundwork about a poet’s deliberate word choice as intro to Vendler’s discussion of rhyme in another of Dickinson’s poems, “The morns are meeker than they were.”

Take a look at that poem and examine its rhyme scheme:  XAXA  XAXA.  Lines 1, 3, 5, and 7 do not rhyme, while lines 2, 4, and 6 do – and line 8 comes close (brown, town, gown, and on).

Of course, if Dickinson wanted a perfect rhyme to end line 8, she would have supplied a perfect rhyme to end line 8.

For example, she could have said, “I’ll don a festive crown.” Or, she could have changed line 6 to something like, “The fields in scarlet drown,” and then saved “gown” to use at the end line 8 with something like, “I’ll don a festive gown” (although “drown” certainly counters the mood of the second stanza). To end line 8 there are other alternative word choices, too, which provide a closer rhyme than with “gown” than “on.”

“Why did Dickinson prefer ‘on’?” you ask. This time, I won’t act the exasperated parent. Instead, let me turn to Vendler.

Early in her book, Vendler discusses typical and prevalent traits and techniques of Dickinson’s style, for example, her frequent use of the em dash. Another is her frequent practice of presenting lists in poems which then suggest, support or build to some profound realization or insight. In reviewing this poem, Vendler writes, “We see here the look of a Dickinson list before it becomes cryptic, or wild, or eccentric. Nonetheless, the list migrates oddly from category to category: time of day; high up fruit of nut tree; ground-low fruit of berry vines and absent flower; a vertical tree; a horizontal field.” Soon the main topic comes into focus, a change of season.

“As a consequence of her observation,” states Vendler, “Dickinson decides that she should participate in the new fashion of self-adornment.”

Vendler offers much more insightful insight on the poem (LOL – how’s that for redundant redundancy?); however, what about that use of the word “on” to end the poem?

Vendler concludes her commentary with this:

“This poem, which is more ingenious than it first appears, maintains the same rhyme-sound throughout. It exhibits a perfect chiming in ‘brown,’ ‘town,’ and ‘gown,’ but is plainer in its dress, like Dickinson, in its closing, simplified ‘on.’”

Yesterday, I wrote about my “close encounter of the poetic kind” at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport last Monday when I met poet Calvin Forbes. Emily Dickinson introduced us. I kid you not. Details are HERE.

Just after Mr. Forbes disappeared into the throng of weary travelers (all dealing with countless weather delays), I clicked on a Poetry Foundation link for one of his poems and read – with utter delight – “The Card Players,” a humorous and heartfelt tribute to three brothers (Forbes’ brothers, if the poem is autobiographical; keep in mind that in July 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse-it does not mean-me-but a supposed person.” Is this the case with Forbes too?).

Forbes’ work unfolds in five stanzas, each of four lines of free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no particular meter. Visually, the work is very “poetic” looking, and though there is no metric pattern, the flow of the language is wholly effective. Additionally, the work is punctuated with a number of poetic elements including internal rhyme, simile, metaphor, onomatopoeia, hyperbole, and even a subtle but apt pun at the end of line 19.

The conversational cadence of the work called to mind lines I’d read recently in George Monteiro’s book Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance about Frost’s take on Dickinson. Frost, known to fuss about Dickinson’s unconventional form, rhyme, and meter, contrasted his work with hers by grumbling, “I try to make good sentences fit the meter.” Ditto here on that point for Forbes. His “good sentences” flow at a pace that he manages as easily as running the flow from a faucet. Compare, for example, the controlled pace of the third stanza when describing the older siblings to the fast-paced, barely-catch-a-breath clip of lines 14 to 19 – only to slow the tempo again in the final line and a half when the odds were evened with the arrival of the fourth. This dynamic, Forbes’ command of pace, is a bit Cummings-esque (think “Buffalo Bill’s,” for example) but with natural speech sans quirky spacing.

The effective flow of the “good sentences” is matched, too, by the number of impactful details of family and brotherly love distributed throughout the poem, dealt like cards in a winning hand. Some examples:

* Line 2: How funny – the three brothers invite a fourth, but not the younger sibling; he merely tags along as “a spare.”

* Lines 11 and 12: The fitting description of the “wild card” third child.

* Line 12: The effective use of the pronoun “it” when describing the moxie of the third brother, ready to fight any of them if “it” rolled beyond talk – no antecedent needed. **chef’s kiss**

* Line 13: The big brothers’ perspective of the little one – even after he had a child of his own.

There are other deft details throughout. For example, the fusion of “jive” in line 5 with the poet’s ease of “shouting out a rhyme” (from line 4) and the inferred game-time banter of friends; Biblical references to underscore weighty perceptions of youth; the gutsy “slam damned” in line 7, referencing both the high-octane zeal of the game as well as the passion paired with the laughter in line 8; the passage of time – “morning noon and night” – reminiscent of Dickinson’s “The second half of joy / Is shorter than the first" (from her poem "Consulting summer's clock" -- which I wrote about just the other day, HERE).

What have I missed? What jumps out for you with Forbes' poem?

THIS HAPPENED:

05.12.2026 & various previous dates: I published posts on some of the butterfly poems of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. 05.13.2026: I published a post on Dickinson’s poem “In the name of the bee” (of which the second line reads “And of the butterfly” before concluding with “And of the breeze. Amen!”). In that post, I noted, “As I was exploring and writing about the various butterfly poems of these two poets, I stumbled upon info related to a (2010) podcast run by Christopher Lydon with an interview of Helen Vendler, an American academic, writer and literary critic (additionally, Vendler was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities).” The podcast (for which I have yet to find an audio file to listen in on the conversation) centered on Vendler’s book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries. 05.14.2026: I ordered Vendler’s book. 05.15.2026: The book arrived.

05.16.2026: I flew to Chicago (to attend an all-French program of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra culminating with Saint-Saëns’ magnificent Symphony No. 3, the “Organ Symphony”), and I began reading the book on my flight.

AND THEN THIS HAPPENED:

05.18.2026: I flew home – and before I get to the good part of the story, let me recount that O’Hare was, for the most part, contained chaos and confusion. I walked into a dense wall of travelers at the congested automated check-in machines, the stalled serpentine TSA lines (both general and pre-check) and the clogged baggage drop-off. I do not exaggerate when I say the scene resembled an outlandish vison by M. C. Escher.

Below: Actual photo of O’Hare on the morning of my departure:

Fortunately, I’d arrived to the spectacle in plenty of time to check-in and pass through the TSA’s low-energy radio frequency waves before grabbing a thirty-dollar snack and taking a seat at my departure gate. There, I pulled out my computer and began working on my daily Dickinson post for the following day.

​There I sat. My laptop was – appropriately – on my lap, and in the seat next to me I’d parked by jeans jacket, my backpack, and my newly acquired book.

At one point, a gentleman across from me spied “DICKINSON” on the spine of Vendler’s volume. He came over and asked if he could take a glance at it. At this point, I can’t recall exactly how the conversation went, but I remember saying something like “Do you know of Vendler?” Yes, yes he was well aware. I remember talking, too, about another book I’d been reading, George Monteiro’s Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, and I mentioned Dickinson’s influence on the young Frost.

“Hmm…I never really thought about that,” said the gentleman – or something to that effect – and at some point I thought to myself, “Okay, who is this I’m talking to?” because I could tell he knew his stuff beyond that of a casual fan of poetry such as myself. In the conversation, I did get his name – Calvin Forbes – so just after he returned my book and walked away, I googled his name. The first link beneath the cluster of photos was to a page on the Poetry Foundation’s website.

I jumped from seat and chased after him. “Mr. Forbes,” I shouted through the passing throng. “Mr. Forbes…Mr. Forbes.”

He heard me and turned his head. “Can I grab a selfie with you?” I asked.

After the quick photo op, I returned to my seat, clicked on the PF link, and selected one of his poems to read, “The Card Players” (HERE). LOVED. IT. I’ll discuss the poem tomorrow.

THEN THIS HAPPENED:

05.20.2026: I ordered a copy of Mr. Forbes’ book Blue Monday.

My Dickinson train-of-thought went off the rails yesterday, so my plan to right the ship today is to pump the brakes a bit and try to stay in my lane. Before I put the cart before the horse, though, let’s hope for smooth sailing ahead! LOL – how’s that for mixing metaphors?

I began yesterday’s post with introductory remarks about Helen Vendler’s book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries, and my original plan was to share a couple of examples of Vendler’s in-depth looks at Dickinson’s form to support if not augment the poems’ messages. I strayed, though, when I mentioned a scene from an episode of "The Simpsons" and then detoured completely after I chanced upon articles related to the University of Colorado’s humor research lab (HuRL). One milestone of HuRL was the development of Benign Violation Theory (BVT), a psychological framework to explain why cartoon violence amuses viewers.

​My plan for today was to return to Vendler and share the examples I had ready yesterday; however, I’m going to put those cases on hold for at least one more day because my mind’s been mulling over all of that HuRL info and HuRL founder Peter McGraw’s work related to “what is funny.” What my mind has been stuck on was Emily Dickinson’s poem “Consulting summer’s clock”:

The basic theme of the poem, of course, centers on the passage of time, particularly how swiftly the seconds fly by (which calls to mind yet another poem, “Fly – fly -- but as you fly," shown below at the bottom of this post). The speaker of the poem, at the midpoint of summer, is shocked that the first half of the season has passed and only half the season remains (just as I am shocked that more than half of May 2026 has passed, and we’re almost at the mid-point of the year). Tempus fugit? More like, Tempus fukit!! LOL – pardon my crudités.

There are two details about this poem which I just LOVE. FIRST, take a look at lines 5 and 6: “The second half of joy / Is shorter than the first.” Dickinson’s take on “time flies when you’re having fun” is such a clever paradox. Two halves are of anything are always equal – so how could “the second half” of joy be shorter than the first? Technically, two halves of anything ARE equal; however, when engaged in enjoyable activities, time becomes distorted. We stop monitoring the clock; the hasty passage of time becomes the polar opposite to “the Hour of Lead” in “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” (shown below at the bottom of this post). ​The SECOND favorite detail from this poem, lines 7 and 8, concludes the work with an insightful understanding of human nature on the part of Dickinson. The statement, “The truth I do not dare to know / I muffle with a jest,” is related to yesterday’s explorations of HuRL’s work on “what is funny” and why people laugh. However, the muffled laughter here is not, in fact, related to anything funny, but something perceived as uncomfortable. The poem closes with a “truth” the speaker does not “dare to know,” and what does the speaker do? She “muffles” the information – “with a jest.” I searched, “Why do people laugh when uncomfortable?” The results included this:

“People laugh when uncomfortable as a physiological defense mechanism to regulate overwhelming emotions and release pent-up nervous energy. It does not mean you find the situation funny; rather, it is a ‘reset button’ your brain uses to reduce stress, avoid freezing, and restore emotional balance.

AN ANECDOTE: All of this reminded me of an incident I dealt with years ago when I was an assistant principal at a high school. A teacher called me to say he was sending two students to my office due to a fight. I was surprised when a boy and a girl showed up. Rarely were any physical conflicts between opposite sexes. I believe I spoke to the girl first. She told me that the young man had called her an insulting name – something involving body shaming – so she hit him. I talked to the boy next. He admitted he’d called her the name, but he said he thought it was her nickname. He said he’d heard her friends call her that name on multiple occasions, so he used the term not thinking it would make her angry. I then spoke to the girl again. I told her what the boy had told me, and she said it was true, her friends did call her that name; however, the name hurt her feelings, and she didn’t know how to tell her friends to stop. When they would call her that name, she would smile and laugh – “muffle” the insult “with a jest.” I suppose on the friends’ part, their behavior was characteristic of BVT in that they thought the teasing was benign, no actual harm done; therefore, their laughter came from a place of amity. However, her smile, her titter came from humiliation and embarrassment – laughter as a defense mechanism to cover hurt feelings, minimize pain (perhaps), and deflect her vulnerability.

Just about a week ago, I wrote about a lost podcast – or at least an elusive one as I have yet to find it – of an interview between Christopher Lydon and Dickinson scholar Helen Vendler. Info on the 2010 interview is HERE, and the focus was on Vendler’s book Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries. Info on the book is HERE.

I travelled to Chicago this past weekend, and prior to my trip, I ordered the book and then began reading it on the plane. My initial reaction to the forty-plus pages I’ve read of the 530: I love it! ; )​

So far I’ve read Vendler’s “A Note on the Text,” her twenty-three-page introduction, and commentaries on eight of Dickinson’s poems, and while I don’t necessarily agree with every perspective of Vendler’s (SPOILER ALERT: I agree with most), I applaud her in-depth look at Dickinson’s structures above and beyond her dissection, deconstruction, and deliberation of Dickinson’s meanings – how the poet’s form and prosody augment and intensify the impact of the metaphorical messages. In the opening paragraph of her introduction, Vendler states that “to enter her poetic entirely a reader would have to know by heart (and by ear) all her poems. Ideally, too, her reader should possess the King James Bible as firmly as she did, and should have read the poetry of the English past as fervently as she had….” Well, I’m sure that’s not the case for many Dickinson enthusiasts (including myself), and Vendler does admit, “Yet readers worldwide, even when they have lacked her background, have flocked to her poems, responding to her candor, her grief, and her wit.” LOL – I’m living proof.

All of this reminded me of a scene from “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge,” the ninth episode of the second season of “The Simpsons,” where – after continued exposure to the gratuitous cartoon violence of cat & mouse Itchy and Scratchy – Maggie Simpson whacks her father over the head with a mallet in a meticulous shot-for-shot parody of the infamous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

Watch Hitchcock's shower scene from "Psycho" HERE. Watch the scene from The Simpsons HERE.

Does one have to have seen “Psycho” to appreciate the dark humor? Of course not. Does it help? Of course. Still, without having seen Hitchcock’s classic, the scene is as downright laughable as is all cartoon violence – amirite?

As an aside, I paused to search “why is cartoon violence so funny,” and I found this:

“Cartoon violence makes us laugh because it relies on the principle of benign violation, a psychological theory suggesting we find things funny when a situation threatens our sense of how the world should work but is ultimately harmless.”

I’m not making this up. Have you heard of this? Here’s a bit more: The Benign Violation Theory (BVT) is a psychological framework developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Humor Research Lab which posits that humor occurs only when three conditions happen simultaneously:

A Violation: Something threatens your sense of how the world “ought to be” (e.g., a moral, social, or physical norm is broken).

Benignity: The situation is perceived as safe, harmless, or okay.

Simultaneity: You recognize both the violation and the harmlessness at the exact same time.

More info is HERE. Okay, let me pump the brakes here for a moment longer – I’ll get back on track again shortly. Does the University of Colorado really have a Humor Research Lab? I ran a search and found this:

“Yes, the University of Colorado Boulder really does have a humor research lab. It is known as the Humor Research Lab (HuRL).”

LOL – oookay – so I believe it – I suppose. While this is the stuff parodies are made of, I believe that this is true. I found additional info (HERE) about one of the lab’s founders, Peter McGraw:

“Prior to the Solo project, I immersed myself in the scientific study of humor, exploring its causes and consequences. I’m pleased to have helped move humor research from the fringes into mainstream academic discussion. A major accomplishment has been co-creating the Benign Violation Theory with Caleb Warren, which explains what makes things funny. To do that, I founded the Humor Research Lab (HuRL). Curious about the theory? Check out my TEDx talk ‘What Makes Things Funny?’ where I summarize our academic insights.”

I have not had the time to view his talk yet (HERE), but I will at some later time. Additionally, I want to look into why it is we laugh when friends fall down or get hurt (in minor ways); I suspect that sort of “clumsy” reaction is related to BVT. For now, though, let me at least swerve back into a lane on Dickinson; however, I’ll provide an example or two from Vendler’s comprehensive analyses of Dickinson’s form tomorrow. Today, since I careened off track into the realm of humor, let me leave you with some comical looks at Dickinson, the woman who put the “fun” in “funeral”:

Yesterday’s post centered on Dickinson’s use of the word “organ.” She used it in one poem – as the musical instrument, not avital body part. I wondered how often she used other instruments in her poetry, so I looked into it. Not including “organ,” the list of instruments for which I checked is below. What do you think – which ones do you think she used? Some were not used at all, but which do you think she used most often? The list: Banjo, bass, bugle, cello, clarinet, cymbal, drum, fiddle, fife, flute, guitar, harp, horn, lyre, piano, tambourine, trombone, trumpet, viola, and violin. The results are below. Don’t peek until you’ve made your guess.

The results:

Dickinson never mentioned any of these instruments in her poetry: bass (she did use the word “bass” in two poems, but not as a musical instrument), cello, clarinet, cymbal, fiddle, gong, harp, horn, lyre, piano, trombone, and viola. Most of this came as no surprise to me, but I did expect to see harp, horn, lyre, and piano. And FYI, just to be safe, I also checked accordion, concertina, harmonica, and harpsichord. I didn’t think I’d find anything on those, and I didn’t – so no surprises there.

In addition to “organ” – and the instrument used most often in her poetry (noted a bit further down the page) – here are the instruments Dickinson included in her works – along with the number of poems in which each particular instrument appears:

So which instrument did Dickinson use most often?

**drum roll please**

The answer is…the drum!

A search for the word “drum” on the Dickinson Archive generates twenty-six entries representing eleven poems; however, only six of those eleven actually include the word “drum.” For two of them, Dickinson listed “drum” as an alternate word choice, and three of them were published in “Drum Beat” magazine in 1864 (and the word “drum” appears in the archives notes about the poems).

I will add that while the word “organ” appears in only one poem, the music of an organ is referenced to in at least one other poem; take a look at lines 3 and 4 of “There’s a certain Slant of Light” (an interesting choice of words given yesterday's discussion on 'I've heard an Organ talk, sometimes"):

A few final notes: I also checked Dickinson’s use of brass, strings, woodwinds, and percussion – the various sections of an orchestra.

In her poem “Musicians wrestle everywhere,” Dickinson describes a band “in brass and scarlet – drest.” She also used the word “brass” as an alloy of copper and zinc in “If your Nerve, deny you.”

Dickinson used the word “strings” in three different poems, but not as instruments in an orchestra.

Before reading today’s post, try this: Read the poem below and think about what it might mean. Determine what Dickinson’s words mean to you before the possibility that your interpretation could be influenced by what is said below.

NOTE: I WILL BE TRAVELLING THIS WEEKEND, SO NO DAILY POSTS ON SATURDAY, 5/16, SUNDAY, 6/17, OR MONDAY, 5/18. I WILL POST TOMORROW, AND THEN I'LL RESUME WITH DAILY POSTS ON TUESDAY, 5/19.

So here’s today’s post:

Parlay the voo Fran-say? Alas I do not. The only two things I know how to say in French are “mow d’lawn,” for “cut the grass,” and “come and tie my shoe,” which I think is a formal way of saying “How are you?”

Why my sudden interest in French? Well, I’m about to enjoy a mostly-French weekend in Chicago. Voici le scoop (that’s “here’s the scoop” in French. I looked it up.)

​I’m a classical music fan, and there are a handful of pieces for which I would travel far and wide to hear. Some examples: I visited Washington DC to hear Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto 2 (before he-who-must-not-be-named destroyed the Kennedy Center); I traveled to Pittsburgh to listen to Lang Lang perform the Grieg Piano Concerto in A Minor; and I trained up to the Big Apple to catch the New York Philharmonic’s interpretation of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture. And this weekend? I’m flying to Chicago to experience Camille Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3, the “Organ Symphony.”

I love the entire symphony, but the final movement is SUBLIME. Interestingly, I ran a search on “sublime music,” and this statement popped up: “Sublime music, characterized as blending awe, beauty, and a slight sense of terror or overwhelming power, transports listeners by tapping into the infinite and humbling them.” Well, I’m not expecting any sense of terror this weekend, but awe, beauty, and overwhelming power – yes! (If you’ve not heard this work, you can listen to the finale HERE – conducted by Gustavo Dudamel at the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris.)

By the way, the CSO concert is all French. In addition to the work by Saint-Saëns, the program includes Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite and Francis Poulenc’s Gloria. Then, the next day, my daughter and I are attending a matinee of Les Miz at the Cadillac Palace Theater. Ooo la la! (That’s another bit of French I know.)

Anyway, with the CSO concert approaching, I searched the Dickinson archive to see if she’d ever used the word “organ” in any of her poems, and she did – in one, “I’ve heard an Organ talk, sometimes" (the poem above).

I gotta say, though, that in exploring this poem, I found a number of analyses that differed greatly from my take on it. Remember that quote I mentioned just above from my search on “sublime music”? This one, “Sublime music, characterized as blending awe, beauty, and a slight sense of terror or overwhelming power, transports listeners by tapping into the infinite and humbling them.”

In Dickinson’s poem, I sensed nothing but awe, beauty and the overwhelming power of music that humbled the speaker in the poem. Other interpretations I came upon, though, were much darker and included more of that “sense of terror” – not necessarily from the organ music itself, but more perhaps from the memories triggered of past traumas which may have occurred within the church?

One comment I saw said, “She was probably molested by someone.” (Hmm…I wonder if the one who offered this observation meant Dickinson or the speaker in the poem?) Others spoke of additional poems by Dickinson that implied psychological and/or physical abuse endured at some point in her life.

For me, though, as a pianist, former high school and college band geek, and lover of classical music, I simply read into the poem the transformative power of transcendent music. The poem does refer to a change in the speaker, but again, I chalked that up to the deep emotional reaction to the music.

I explored one article from the National Library of Medicine entitled “The transformative power of music: Insights into neuroplasticity, health, and disease” (HERE). It discussed how music can induce changes in heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, and more – all from the emotions brought on by chords, rhythms, and melodies. The power of music connects, transforms, and heals – and that’s what I read into Dickinson’s poem. I wonder – if you read the poem first before reading any of this – did your interpretation land closer to mine – or closer to those who perceived something more troubling?

Let me know, and for now I’ll just say “la vee.” I’m to understand the French say that a lot.

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