I think the first parody that ever occurred to me was the top one, a response to an album of Emily Dickinson poems that my mother purchased and played for us when we were in grades school. It was horrible . . . This woman with a sickly sweet voice, much like a female Mr. Rogers, recited Dickinson's poems. After listening to the record a few times, I turned to my sister and said, I think I want to throw up! Do you?
The second is a parody of Dickinson's "I'll tell you how the sun rose/ A ribbon at a time. The steeples swarm in amethyst, the news like squirrels ran./ The hills untied their bonnets . . ."
The parody came to mind when I was in high school- with my mother for one of her weekly visits to the beauty parlor. I remember thinking of the steeples of curlers in Aqua Net, the mouths ran and ran, their heads in bonnets . . .
Those were the days of sets, perms, and big hair.
5 comments:
Well, it's about time we had a bit of parodic Emily. I've often thought the "real" Emily was largely parody... but then I've often thought that about --- (fill in names), too.
But we've discussed our common love for saying what we shouldn't. It just pops out. (Get a bag, quick!)
As you're a "dog person" (well, you know what I mean), thought you might enjoy this little hair of the Swinburne.
I love your link!
You think of Emily as parodic? Interesting.
Either parodic or totally humorless, which makes it funny in an odd way.
I am never sure who means to be funny. I have a bad habit of finding humor in all the wrong places. And supposed humor . . . I just kind of nod at.
Totally humorless, self-parodic.
Yet of course also historical, dull, and perfectly iconic.
What would Literature be without her?
(Why is it that for some people the real fun seems always to be hid in all the wrong places?)
A poet friend of mine, Zoe Anglesey, years back said once in conversation Dickinson in her poems often used what was the current scientific language at the time she was writing. We didn't talk about specific examples, though sometime after that I browsed through Dickinson's poems, and I felt like I caught a little of the sense of what Zoe was saying.
(Zoe is, unfortunately, no longer among us, so I can't now ask her for examples.)
At some point or other I discovered, through random experimenting, that many of Emily Dickinson's poems work well when they are read out loud to jazz music. Especially meditative, probing jazz from the later half of the 20th century (Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, etc.).
Not every piece of jazz music necessarily, and not necessarily all of Dickinson's poems, but (for instance) "I heard a Fly buzz" accompanied by something slow-tempo (Mingus or Miles Davis), or "Because I could not stop for Death" accompanied by one of Coltrane's more intense surging pieces.
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