The Bird Who Sings at Night – Blackbird and Company

While she formally published fewer than a dozen poems, Emily Dickinson wrote eighteen hundred over the course of her lifetime. The main reason more of her work went unpublished is largely because she chose not to. Instead, she left her lovely poetry to the world in her own way—by hand.

“By hand” has grown scarce in education and culture at large. How many of us sculpt or knit or compose music, sketch in a journal, craft a poem—with pencil on paper? Too few!

Pencil, scissors, needle thread, canvas, fine paper, and a BIG idea. This is how I began to tackle the first page of Six Breaths of Fall—download for FREE here and join the making.

The Autumn Artfest is inspired by ephemera—a wonderfull word to get to know. The definition we are looking for is: a publication designed to be short-lived. Here I return to Dickinson whose ephemera persists. Her little made by hand books, her fascicles, are collections of carefully curated poetry written on meaningful scraps, stitched together, and kept safe in a drawer—forty fascicles containing 800 individual poems! Emily Dickinson’s work elevates the meaning of ephemera. Later in her short life, she began creating poems on recycled envelopes. There are in excess of 50 of these little gems. Te prompt this week is a singular image one such envelope poem [A 320 (Fr1478A), ca. 1878]: One note from / One Bird.

Inspired by this nugget, I began stitching a little songbird. As I stitched slowly, the bird emerged and I once again thought of Dickinson, poem 314 (all her poems are numbered as she did not title her poems):

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

And sore must be the storm –

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

Yet – never – in Extremity,

It asked a crumb – of me.

I started with a sentence: Sun slowly sinking the sky her feathered song rises to greet the gloaming.

Next comes line break:

Sun slowly / sinking into sky, / her feathered / song rises to / greet the gloaming.

Sun slowly

sinking into sky,

her feathered

song rises to

greet the gloaming.

Of course his little poem is a nod to wonderful Emily and I will copy its final draft in pencil as my first entry into the Six Breaths of Fall tiny chapbook.

Now it’s your turn to ger started. I can’t wait to see what you share. Send photos via our social media or to our email. Let’s create together ephemera for the 21st century.

“Let’s strive together to part with time more reluctantly, to watch the pinions of the fleeting moment until they are dim in the distance & new coming moment claims our attention.” ~Emily Dickinson from the Preface of Envelope Poems.

~Kimberly