By Joel Spencer
My first instinct was to hop around in the book and select poems that spoke to me and seemed to be "song-like." I found this approach to be difficult due to Emily's change in mood. I found that the poems and the years in which they were written had a direct relationship with one another. As Dickinson grew older and more mature, so did her poems. The overall mood of her poems changes from year to year, and when trying to make a song of her poems, the change in mood presented a roadblock. I needed the song to show a central mood or theme, and this was hard to do when the poems I had chosen were written at different stages in her life.
After several attempts and failures, I started to get frustrated. I put my books down, smoked a cigarette, poured a drink and set myself to thinking. As I gazed at my book on the floor I noticed that there were several places where the book's spine was broken and the pages would lay flat -- that's what you get with a good "used book." I decided to let fate play its role in my choosing of poems. I turned to every spot where the pages would lay flat, and, because the poems were consecutive in number, they held a common mood. This proved to be my salvation in this project, because within a half hour I had my Dickinson song. The poems I chose were numbers 1565, 1566, 1567 for the chorus, numbers 1568 and 1567 for the chorus again, and 1569, 1564, and 1567 as the final chorus. The song is named "The Heart has Many Doors."
Listen to Joel's Song