Second verse of surrealist look at poet Dickinson starts today
Alena Smith’s idea for an inventive or, as she describes it, “bizarre” television series about 19th century poet Emily Dickinson had been percolating in her mind for a decade when she first pitched the idea in 2013.
“I kept calling it ‘Louie’ about Emily Dickinson,” said Smith, referring to comedian Louis C.K.’S bleak, yet brilliant, hard-to-classify FX comedy. “I wanted it to be an experimental, surrealist, collaged, subjective half-hour (show) from the perspective of Emily Dickinson and her radical imagination.”
Hollywood wasn’t quite ready to go with the playwright turned screenwriter’s audacious vision.
“They said, ‘That sounds great. What are you talking about?’ ” Smith, whose credits include episodes of Showtime’s “The Affair” and HBO’S “The Newsroom,” recalled during a phone interview from Los Angeles.
Still, Smith kept her idea alive in her mind, fine-tuning it. The resulting show, “Dickinson,” which premiered in 2019 as part of Apple TV+’S first batch of original series, is as idiosyncratic and daring as its writer first envisioned.
Hailee Steinfeld portrays the celebrated poet as a headstrong young woman blazing with talent and desire — for men, as well as her brother’s wife, Sue (Ella Hunt), a relationship Dickinson scholars have called the abiding love interest of her lifetime.
In Smith’s reimagining, Dickinson is an 1800s poet with a 21stcentury sensibility. She bristles at the limited choices available to women and pours her bold visions onto the page.
She also kisses her BFF, throws wild opium parties, berates Henry David Thoreau for being entitled and imagines Death (played by rapper Wiz Khalifa) as more chill than menacing. With its
lavish costumes and pop and hip-hop-heavy soundtrack, it’s no surprise the series was nicknamed “Sexy Dickinson” by its fan base. The show won a 2020 Peabody Award and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award.
The “Dickinson” creator and showrunner spoke about the second season, set to release its first three episodes today.
Q: When did you first get the Emily Dickinson bug and become fascinated with her as a person?
A: I liked Emily Dickinson’s poems as a young person. I found them mysterious and odd, like riddles. They contained the biggest ironies of life packed into the smallest containers.
But the thing that really got me into Dickinson was a biography, “My Wars Are Laid Away in Books,” and another book called “Dickinson Unbound” by a younger Dickinson scholar, Alexandra Socarides. She made the point that Emily’s life was fundamentally unrequited, whether it was in
love or in readership. She was so intense and wanted to find someone who could match that intensity, and she never really did.
Q: Emily Dickinson looks somber in the one extant photo of her, and people think of her as this recluse who scribbled away in obscurity. Did you intentionally want to complicate that reputation?
A: Absolutely. We’re channeling the spirit of her work, and her work is nothing but unconventional. It’s really important to realize that Emily Dickinson wasn’t weird or doing (poetry) wrong because she didn’t know what it looked like to do it right. She was the great-granddaughter of the founder of Amherst College and was surrounded by literature and literary people. She definitely knew what conventionally acceptable poetry looked like and was a genius who chose not to do it that way.
She intuited movements in poetry that would not happen until 100 years after her death, which is how I came around to the idea she has this modern consciousness trapped in an 1850s life.