Students from Martha
Ackmann's Emily Dickinson seminar pose with a Dickinson figure
dressed for her December 9 birthday celebration. Left to right are:
Angela Scibelli FP, Kate Flewelling '00, Cynthia Krohn '00 and Mary
Kate Shea '00. 
Mount Holyoke's third annual
celebration of the anniversary (in this case the 169th) of Emily
Dickinson's birth will bring you closer to the famous poet and MHC
alumna (1847 - 1848) than you ever thought possible. In addition to
indulging in birthday cake and donning party hats, party-goers will
have the unique opportunity to have a Polaroid photograph taken of
themselves with a cardboard figure of Dickinson.
On a more serious side, the event will
feature a lecture titled "Dickinson, the Springfield Republican, and the Question of Publication" by
Karen Dandurand, a Chicopee native who identified two anonymous poems
published in 1858 and 1864 by the Springfield Republican as Dickinson's works. The
celebration, which is sponsored by Mount Holyoke's women's studies
program, will be held Thursday, December 9, at 7:30 pm in the New
York Room in Mary Woolley Hall.
Dandurand, an associate professor of
English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, will return to the
area to discuss for the first time with the public how she uncovered
the Dickinson poems. Only ten of Emily Dickinson's poems are known to
have been published during the poet's lifetime, and all of them were
anonymous. Seven of the ten were printed in Dickinson's local
newspaper, the Springfield Republican, which is the predecessor of today's
Springfield
Union-News/Sunday Republican. Dandurand's "discovery" about ten
years ago accounts for two of the seven in the Republican and are the latest Dickinson poems to
be identified. Dandurand is cofounder and coeditor of LEGACY: A Journal of American Women
Writers and is vice
president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.
"The lecture ties in nicely with a
public education program being prepared by students in my
community-based learning seminar Emily Dickinson in Her Times," says
women's studies professor and Dickinson scholar Martha Ackmann.
Students are researching the poet's connection with the
Springfield Republican
and the significance
of the seven poems published in the newspaper. Their work will
culminate next week in a special presentation to Dickinson Homestead
tour guides and a public exhibition on display at the Dickinson
Homestead in Amherst from March through December of 2000.
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