who wrote this thing: Two days in Western Mass (Emily, the Girls, and Three Little Boys)

Smith College
Walking around Smith is like walking into a campus melodrama from the 1950s. If it weren’t for the day-glo green and orange triangle furniture in the seven sisters’ equivalent of a student union, it could just as easily be 1925.

Quick Tour: Mt. Holyoke, Hampshire College, Amherst Commons, UMass
At each location, the poets read outside the bus with a portable PA. At Hampshire (Joshua Beckman’s alma mater), we weren’t authorized to come on campus. Bill drove us through the grounds, while Joshua shouted through a bullhorn, “Students of Hampshire College, come and listen to the poets.” By the third curve, campus security was already on us. Joshua got off the bus to talk to them and we were all laughing about how we were busted, but the officer said, “We have a place for you, follow us” and they led us to the middle of the lawn. We’re pretty subversive.

Emily’s Room
I hate it when people refer to great literary figures, who happen to be women, by their first names (Hemingway, Proust, Shakespeare… Emily), but it’s common with ED, and generally from the mouths of women. I caught myself doing it. The bus parked in Amherst five minutes from her house, and I said, “I’m going down to Emily’s house.”

I had this fantasy about standing in her room: how I’d be paralyzed with inspiration, how I’d look out the same window she did, how I’d weep from the tragic, claustrophobic isolation. Like many author houses, you have to take a tour to see The Room. I just missed the 2:30 30-minute tour and spent 25 minutes trying to convince the docents at the Dickinson Homestead that I needed to see The Room.

I studied her in grad school.
I know all about the fascicles and variants.
I’m here with the poetry bus.
I’m only in Amherst for 30 minutes.

The first docent explained that I could look at “these three rooms,” which consisted of a display about publication history (which was really just pictures of her literary executors), pictures of life in the kitchen, and a gift shop. She pointed me to the window so I could see The Room from outside.

The 90-minute tour guide, a patient woman with a slight English accent, agreed that I could just go on the first part of her tour, the main house, but that would be 50 minutes. I asked if she could just tell me a little about The Room. She pointed me to the window so I could see it from outside. Then she spent three minutes telling me the real estate history of the house. I am now glad I don’t have time for the tour. It reminds me of when I volunteered for the Hemingway Museum and Birthplace Home in Oak Park, IL, where many of the docents were retired moms who spent most of the tour talking about Hem’s poor, maligned mother.

This is as close as I got to Emily’s room.

When I got back to the bus, no one was there, so I wandered down to the cemetery.

I came back to the bus again and no one was there. I made the bank deposit and handed out a bunch of stickers and tattoos to the youth punks hanging out in the park. One of them informed me that “poetry is cool.”