party with Emily

Having a big party this holiday season? Looking for a recipe? Perhaps Emily Dickinson’s Black Cake recipe is just what you need. If you bake, you’ll recognize that a cake made with two pounds each of flour, sugar, and butter, plus nineteen eggs is not your run-of-the-mill dessert. Visit the Harvard Library link, above, to view the complete recipe with instructions. And please let us know how it tastes!

Happy Birthday, Emily!

on poetry

“I have been asking myself to be more attentive & porous — to pay attention to the way every inch of me is animal, every inch of me is earth. I am trying to remember this. Where is my cloud? Where is my sea? What do the lungs hunt? What does the eye have in common with the teeth?”
Aracelis Girmay
(b. December 10, 1977)

. . . . .
photo by Sheila Griffin
quote

Send Emily a postcard

Emily Dickinson‘s birthday is December 10 and to honor the occasion, The Emily Dickinson Museum, in Amherst, Massachusetts, invites you to send Emily a postcard.

Postcards received by December 10 will be displayed in a special exhibition, “The World Writes Back: Postcards to Emily Dickinson.” (Just learned about this; sorry for the late notice.)

The details and address are here.

on poetry

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
Emily Dickinson
(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)

. . . . .
portrait

on poetry

“I have continued to prefer, and write, poems that have what you might call ‘a sting in the tail.’”
Carolyn Kizer
(December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014)
. . . . .
AP Photo/Estate of Carolyn Kizer, Thomas Victor