My Business Is To Sing

Join poet, screenwriter and narrator Susan Snively, producer and film-maker Ernest Urvater on Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at the Meekins Library from 7 to 9 p.m. for a screening of the new insightful documentary about the extraordinary poet Emily Dickinson, My Business is to Sing, the third film in the trilogy Angles of a Landscape.

This 40-minute film demonstrates how the music of Dickinson's time gave life to her poetic voice. It features hymns, popular songs, brass bands, ballet, concert pieces, and opera, as well as a song by composer Alice Parker. Nineteenth-century art, the natural world, and images from her home bring to life the poet's "Titanic Operas."

This program is part of the Meekins' ongoing occasional series celebrating biography and the stories of people here in the Valley. It is the stories of our historical Valley friends and neighbors that reach across generations and make this a special place. This program is free and everyone is welcome.

From early childhood, the poet played "moosic," took piano and singing lessons, and later improvised her own "weird and beautiful melodies" to entertain her family and friends. Using the meter and rhyme of hymns and ballads for her own artistic purposes, Dickinson expressed complex emotions and ideas, and remarkable images, in her revolutionary "songs."

My Business is to Sing is based on Carolyn Cooley's 2003 book, The Music of Emily Dickinson's Poems and Letters and is the third in the series, Angles of a Landscape: Perspectives on Emily Dickinson, which explores little-known aspects of Dickinson's life and work.

The first film in the trilogy, The Poet in Her Bedroom (2008), offers a general introduction to the poet and her work. The second film, Seeing New Englandly (2010), explores the poet's education, her lifelong interest in science and literature, her fascination with the search for the Northwest Passage, her response to the Civil War, and her despair when serious eye problems threatened her with blindness. The Poet in Her Bedroom was written by Terry Y. Allen; Seeing New Englandly, by Susan Snively. The producer for the entire series is Ernest Urvater.

For more information call: 268-7472 or 538-6489; contact Daria D'Arienzo at ddarienzo@me.com. Williamsburg and Haydenville residents, who might need a ride, please contact the Meekins Library.

Last updated: February 7, 2013