It’s one of the beauties — and also the oddities — of social media that every day you find out what people who might not call you or pop you an email are up to. Recently I saw that poet Joshua Michael Stewart was going to be writing in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom at The Homestead, the museum and grounds of the Dickinson property in Amherst.
I sent Stewart, who lives in Ware, an email, asking: “Do you get to write at her desk? Are you allowed to lie down on her bed? How’d you get that gig?”
In response to my barrage of haphazard, envy-driven questions, Stewart penned the eloquent essay printed below.
Lucky for us, Stewart will be featured reader at the Greenfield Word open mic series held at 9 Mill St., Greenfield on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 7 p.m. along with fellow Hedgerow Press poet Andrea Stone. Stewart’s book “Break Every String,” and Stone’s “American Spelling: Story in Verse” have been previous topics of this column.
By Joshua Michael Stewart
I had the honor to give a reading at the Emily Dickinson Homestead Museum along with fellow poet, Jonathan Wright, during their August, Amherst Art Walk and Poetry Night event, which takes place on the first Thursday of every month from March to December, and as a gesture of gratitude, the museum offers each featured reader a private session to reflect and write in Dickinson’s newly restored bedroom.
Except for when I was there for the reading, I’ve never been to the Emily Dickinson Museum, and had never been upstairs. I didn’t know what to expect. The first thing that caught my eye was the famous white dress, which is clothed over a headless mannequin. It’s quite creepy, to be honest.
I’ve visited Dickinson’s grave several times over the years at the West Cemetery in
Amherst, and it’s not very well kept — tall grass grows all around the old stones, and toward the south end of the cemetery, there’s an abandoned apartment complex that butts up against the property. So I had the image of the cemetery in my head the entire time I was trying to write.
The curators had set up a card table and a metal folding chair next to Emily’s roped-off bed. There’s a jack where I was able to plug in my laptop. I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to actually write at her desk, but it makes sense. The chances of someone accidentally damaging the furniture are far too great. One of the things the curators tell you is to not bring pens into the room.
I find a bit of irony in that — that you can’t use ink, which is what Emily would have used, and they encourage you to use your computer, a technology she could have never dreamed of using.
When I walked into her bedroom I took notice of all the things in her room like her bed, her desk, the wallpaper roses, and of course, the white dress, but the private session only lasts for an hour, and I was most concerned about getting to work.
I had a bit of a poem that I had already started earlier in the week, so I noodled with that for a while, but then I started to concentrate on writing crisp, clear and interesting sentences of whatever popped into my head without considering how one sentence related to the other. This is my normal process of starting a new poem. I almost never sit down and say, “Okay, today I will write about such and such.” I just jot down random sentences and when I have about a hundred of them I go through them and delete and add as I see fit. I rearrange the sentences to see which ones relate to one another. The word “construct” really applies to my poems. Despite my poems’ narrative natures, creating them is more like making a collage than writing a story.
I’ve been writing a lot of jazz poems lately, and asked myself if Emily would’ve listened to jazz. Thinking of how progressive her poetry was — and still is — I figured (or maybe I just want it to be so) she would’ve been a fan.
From the window that I was facing, I could see Main Street leading into town. You can see the police station where a boarding house once stood. It is there Robert Frost stayed when he first came to teach at Amherst College.
I wondered how much Emily would be able to recognize if she were to walk downtown today. This lead me to think about how vastly different our lives are, and would have been even if we lived in the same time period.
It’s always claimed that Emily came from a middle-class background, but wealth is relative. To my ancestors who were Appalachian farmers, who even up through the 1980s lived in tarpaper shacks without indoor plumbing, the Dickinson family would not have been seen as anything else but rich.
Looking around, I couldn’t help but to think about my apartment, and how it’s only slightly larger than her bedroom. Stepping away from my own experience, I thought of what it means to be “middle class” today. Most people I know who consider themselves middle class could never hire servants or afford the Dickinson house if it was on the market today.
I guess thoughts of class struggle are never far from where I’m sitting.