Poets & Writers Theater

“Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.” In this animated TED-Ed video, poet Jane Hirshfield discusses the art and use of metaphors in our daily lives and in the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg.

Watch the video for musician Andrew Bird’s interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” a duet with Phoebe Bridgers included in his album Inside Problems. Of the poem, Bird says, “I came across this Emily Dickinson poem and found it to be the most vivid description of an inner world I’ve ever encountered.”

“To me all good poetry is experimental in some way,” says poet Susan Howe in this film about Emily Dickinson by poet and filmmaker Benita Raphan, filmed on location at the Morgan Library & Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Raphan, a Guggenheim fellow known for her short experimental films, died at the age of fifty-eight on January 10, 2021.

Dickinson is the first web television series from Apple TV Plus, a period piece about Emily Dickinson with a modern and comedic twist starring Hailee Steinfeld. Created by Alena Smith, the cast includes Jane Krakowski as Mrs. Dickinson, Zosia Mamet as Louisa May Alcott, John Mulaney as Henry David Thoreau, and Wiz Khalifa as Death.

Wild Nights With Emily is a comedic biopic about Emily Dickinson focusing on her irreverent sense of humor and inspired by love letters she penned to her brother’s wife. Directed by Madeleine Olnek, the film stars Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson and Susan Ziegler as her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson.

In this video, PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown tours an exhibit on Emily Dickinson at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, where visitors can listen to readings of her poems, examine remnants of her life, and view handwritten manuscripts.

Cynthia Nixon plays the role of Emily Dickinson in Terence Davies’s biopic A Quiet Passion, which explores the nineteenth-century poet’s relationships and writing life. The film, also starring Keith Carradine and Jennifer Ehle, premiered at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival.

Bill Murray reads work by poets such as Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, and Lorine Niedecker to an audience of construction workers who built the Poets House space in Battery Park City in New York City.

Featuring the poem “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” by Emily Dickinson, narrated by Anna Martine, this video was animated by Hannah Jacobs for Poetry of Perception, a series of scientific animated short films.

In celebration of Emily Dickinson's 184th birthday today, we share this collage of clips from films featuring her famous poems. The video accompanied a talk at the Emily Dickinson Museum with Jerome Charyn, author of the novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson (W.W. Norton, 2010) in 2011.

“Unlike most authors, she did not publish in her own lifetime.” This video clip features the Emily Dickinson Archive, which offers high-resolution images of Dickinson's poetry, transcripts, and annotations from her historical and scholarly work.

Michael McClure, whose poetry Allen Ginsberg described as "a blob of protoplasmic energy," performs one of his poems as well as one by Emily Dickinson in this clip from 2007. McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, which includes an introduction by the late Leslie Scalapino, is out this month from the University of California Press.

To commemorate the birthday of Emily Dickinson, who was born on December 10, 1830, we offer a video that illustrates the far-reaching influence of the poet's work. This Polish music video, which is based on the Dickinson poem "Much madness is divinest sense," performed by Monika Wierzbicka, and directed by Michal Jaskulski, has been selected for numerous film festival competitions and won several international awards.