Garrison Keillor focuses his unique style on Emily Dickinson, in her hometown
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AMHERST - Garrison Keillor came to Emily Dickinson's hometown Thursday, the night before the 180th anniversary of the poet's birth, to deliver a lively lecture on American literature interspersed with humorous storytelling.
Keillor called Dickinson "the most famous shy person in America" - a title that could well apply to him as a radio personality who has served up music and live comedy on public radio's "A Prairie Home Companion" for more than 30 years.
About 550 people crammed Amherst College's Johnson Chapel, which Keillor chose as the site of his performance because it was standing in Dickinson's day. About 130 people paid to see live video streaming elsewhere on the campus.
"An amazing poet came out of this town and wrote poems that still come back to surprise you, even if you've read them over and over again," Keillor said.
Emily Dickinson was "a passionate woman, a lover of this world who was always aware of how brief and fragile life is," he said. During the second half of her life in Amherst, she saw very few people, he said.
"This reclusiveness was simply a letting go of the scaffolding of things she didn't need anymore," he said. "She had the intolerance of triviality and conversation that all of us feel as we get older. We've heard it all before. If you write thousands of poems and letters, you're busy. That's why she hid away, not out of some syndrome."
Dickinson's poetry, virtually unknown in her lifetime, anticipated surrealism and the stream-of-consciousness technique, Keillor said.
"She had a powerful resistance to the accepted mode of religion and the staid, inflated rhetoric of poetry," he said. "She cannot walk a line she doesn't believe. She had a restlessness in her soul that was part of what drove her to be a writer."
Today, Dickinson's grave in Amherst is a shrine to admirers who come there from all over the world. She is beloved in a way that no other writer is, Keillor said.
"She's the best friend of all shy, reclusive English majors," he said. "Women want to be her best friend and men want to be her lover." People feel so close to her that they want to know more about the woman who stares out at us in the only known photograph of her, he said.
Keillor read several Dickinson poems. He also read a rambling letter she wrote at age 12 about hens that sounded a little like one of his radio monologues. He read another letter, from age 14, to a religious friend in which she says she is "almost persuaded to be a Christian."
He told two stories from his own youth that mirrored Dickinson's topics. The first was about his father killing chickens even after the family moved to the outskirts of a city. The other was about a revival meeting at which an evangelist mistook his hay fever-induced watery eyes for weeping and lifted the boy up so close that he could smell whiskey on the man's breath.
Keillor, who has parodied Dickinson on his radio show as much as he's honored her, couldn't resist some good-natured tomfoolery. He read a version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as Dickinson might have written it.
He provided this updated version of one of her poems: "Because I could not stop my bike I ran into a tree. The molecules inside my head roared like a storm at sea."
He sang one Dickinson poem to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas."
Amherst College President Anthony Marx introduced Keillor as "a shrewd observer of human nature, sometimes nice and sometimes less nice. He's helped us appreciate the humble stoicism of Midwesterners and to laugh a little and kindly at their foibles and at ours."
Thus acknowledged, Keillor called Dickinson's family circle "a cast of characters out of a Flaubert novel." He addressed the affair between the poet's brother and the wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor "who was looking through the wrong end of the telescope."
Keillor agreed to come to Amherst to raise money for the Emily Dickinson Museum, and his biggest applause line of the night was when he urged that funds be raised to restore the house where she lived. His visit raised about $30,000 for the museum, said director Jane Wald.
He concluded the evening by leading the audience in singing the 1960s hit "My Girl" ("I've got sunshine on a cloudy day ...") and "Happy Birthday."
