![\"John](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/John-Shoptaw-500.png\")
John Shoptaw is a senior continuing lecturer at UC Berkeley. This semester, he\u2019s teaching a research seminar on the poetry of Emily Dickinson.<\/p>\nIn order to truly experience the poetry of Emily Dickinson, it must be read aloud, says Berkeley English senior continuing lecturer John Shoptaw. You have to hear her irregular metrics, her slant rhymes and signature dashes, in order to glimpse her inner world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A distinguished Dickinson scholar, Shoptaw first heard the poet\u2019s verse as an undergraduate student in an American literature survey class at the University of Missouri-Rolla in the late 1970s. They read the poem \u201cApparently with no Surprise.\u201d It\u2019s a day he\u2019ll never forget.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Apparently with no surprise\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To any happy flower,<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The frost beheads it at its play \u2013<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In accidental power \u2013<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The blond assassin passes on \u2013<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The sun proceeds unmoved\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To measure off another day \u2013<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For an approving God \u2013<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The poem isn\u2019t about seeing, says Shoptaw, but about being blind to the minor catastrophes that occur every day on Earth. He was struck by the poem\u2019s impurity. It lived in the liminal spaces, somewhere between hope and despair, speech and song. It wasn\u2019t one thing or the other, but something else entirely.\u00a0<\/p>\n
John Shoptaw is a senior continuing lecturer at UC Berkeley. This semester, he\u2019s teaching a research seminar on the poetry of Emily Dickinson.<\/p>\n
UC Berkeley<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t exactly love at first sight, because that would be too easy,\u201d he says. \u201cYou know, it was bewilderment at first sight. It was something I\u2019d never heard, and I said, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s a hymn.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Shoptaw is from southeastern Missouri, where he grew up hearing hymns all around him. At church, he would sing \u201cA Mighty Fortress Is Our God,\u201d written by Martin Luther in the late 1520s, and \u201cAmazing Grace,\u201d the 1773 hymn written by John Newton.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like much of Dickinson\u2019s verse, Shoptaw notes, these hymns are written in common meter, a rhythmic structure that allows them to be easily sung and memorized by the congregation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the years, scores of musicians have transformed Dickinson\u2019s verse into song, from composer Aaron Copland\u2019s 1950 song cycle to Phoebe Bridgers\u2019 recent spectral reimagining of her poems. And on Saturday, Feb. 7, Cal Performances is presenting a new co-commissioned work, Emily \u2014 No Prisoner Be<\/a>, composed by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts and performed by mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and the string trio Time for Three. In a series of 24 intimate songs, the performers traverse selected poetry of Dickinson, bringing her voice to audiences in the campus\u2019s Zellerbach Hall. Following the performance, Shoptaw will join the members of Time for Three and DiDonato for a post-performance talk, free to all ticket holders.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe wonderful thing about her poetry is that, at times, it absolutely feels explosive, outward and expanding,\u201d says DiDonato, \u201cand at other times, it implodes inward, but with just as much veracity. She can go to the ends of the universe and into the smallest inner workings of the heart or soul.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A voice meant to be heard<\/p>\n Dickinson was born in 1830 to a prominent family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Though she was a prolific writer, she famously retreated to her family home in her 30s, living a largely reclusive life during the Civil War. Because her work was so unconventional, Dickinson never truly pursued publication; of her nearly 1,800 poems, fewer than a dozen were published during her lifetime, and even those were heavily edited to fit the era\u2019s standard rules of grammar.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, gift of Millicent Todd Bingham, 1956<\/a><\/p>\n Although the public might not have understood her poetry, Dickinson continued writing in her own style, channeling her vast interiority through her verse right up until her death in 1886. Only decades later did artists begin to bring her unconventional lines to the stage, proving that her private voice was meant to be heard.<\/p>\n The poems in Emily \u2014 No Prisoner Be are wide-ranging, from the irregular \u201cWild Nights! Wild Nights!\u201d, a breathless incantation of longing with endless interpretations, to \u201cI tie my Hat \u2013 I crease my Shawl,\u201d about the daily tasks one does to keep it together and not explode. Another in the repertoire, \u201cI felt a Funeral, in my Brain,\u201d is a leaden, inexorable thrum that explores the suffocating internal grief of the Civil War years. Shoptaw deems it Dickinson\u2019s most ambitious poem. \u201cThere\u2019s no poem more dramatic or emotionally intense than this poem,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,<\/p>\n And Mourners to and fro<\/p>\n Kept treading \u2013 treading \u2013 till it seemed<\/p>\n That Sense was breaking through \u2013<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And when they all were seated,<\/p>\n A Service, like a Drum \u2013<\/p>\n Kept beating \u2013 beating \u2013 till I thought<\/p>\n My mind was going numb \u2013<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And then I heard them lift a Box<\/p>\n And creak across my Soul<\/p>\n With those same Boots of Lead, again,<\/p>\n Then Space \u2013 began to toll,<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n As all the Heavens were a Bell,<\/p>\n And Being, but an Ear,<\/p>\n And I, and Silence, some strange Race,<\/p>\n Wrecked, solitary, here \u2013<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And then a Plank in Reason, broke,<\/p>\n And I dropped down, and down \u2013<\/p>\n And hit a World, at every plunge,<\/p>\n And Finished knowing \u2013 then \u2013<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In Amherst, Dickinson lived next to a cemetery and would see funeral processions go by her window, the drum beating as the mourners trod on. But in this poem \u2014 which Shoptaw links to the shattering death of her brother\u2019s dear friend, Frazar Stearns, during the war \u2014 she\u2019s not watching from her room. Rather, she\u2019s in the casket with him, being plunged into the earth, buried by grief.<\/p>\n It\u2019s this expansiveness of place and time that DiDonato says the artists aim to capture in their performance Emily \u2014\u00a0No Prisoner Be.\u00a0<\/p>\n Channelling 19th-century voices<\/p>\n The upcoming Dickinson performance has a familiar resonance for Shoptaw, whose own creative work once echoed through the very same hall. Back in 2007, the balcony rang with the choruses of Our American Cousin<\/a>, an opera by Eric Sawyer reimagining the night of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s assassination for which Shoptaw wrote the libretto.<\/p>\n \u201cWe aren\u2019t trying to recreate her room; we are showing the vastness of her imagination and creativity,\u201d says DiDonato. \u201cSo the space is open, abstract and can become anything the listener cares to invent. We absolutely followed the mystical and infinite world of her poetry and not the limitations of her physical world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This semester, Shoptaw is teaching a research seminar on Dickinson\u2019s poetry. Like the musicians, he encourages his students to \u201cfind your own Dickinson \u2014 the Dickinson that especially speaks to you.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s a poem about love and death. Or maybe it\u2019s her way of using metaphor or dashes or irregular meter.\u00a0<\/p>\n For Shoptaw, the beauty of Dickinson\u2019s verse lies in its embodied nature that invites every reader \u2014 and every musician \u2014 to become a part of the performance. \u201cFor Dickinson, the experience always transcends reality,\u201d he says. \u201cWhatever it is, \u201cyou have to be responsive.\u201d<\/p>\n An antidote to our endless digital scroll<\/p>\n When Shoptaw teaches Dickinson, he always asks his students to read the poems out loud. They go around the room, performing stanza by stanza. Often their stanzas will be syntactically linked, so one person will end in the middle of the sentence and another will pick it up with the next. They have to work in sync, piecing together the poems in an imperfect way.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a far cry from \u2014 or a rebuff of \u2014 the smooth, polished transactions of digital technology, especially generative AI, says Shoptaw.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amherst College Archives & Special Collections<\/a><\/p>\n Like Dickinson, whose papers were full of coffee and tea stains, blots, cross-outs, and alternate words scrawled in the margins, students in his class don\u2019t use computers, but instead mark up their course readers as they go. It\u2019s this physical and emotional work that her poetry requires \u2014 this struggle to understand \u2014 that Shoptaw says makes Dickinson\u2019s poetry still resonate with audiences 150 years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe poems are constantly changing,\u201d Shoptaw says. \u201cYou can\u2019t get lulled into the smoothness, because it\u2019s just surprise after surprise. You constantly hit that roughness.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHer poems are immortal \u2014 they\u2019ve outlived her \u2014 but they\u2019re not timeless,\u201d he continues. \u201cThey\u2019re transhistorical, because as they go through time, their meanings, their settings, change. We respond to them in different ways for different reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n DiDonato says that in a world of hyper-connectivity, where YouTube influencers and TikTok\u2019s neverending scroll abound, Dickinson\u2019s poetry offers us a different way of being.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt was her way of navigating a complicated world within a very complex self,\u201d says DiDonato. \u201cWhat a great example to us in 2026 to just sit with ourselves, with our thoughts, with our imagination and creative souls, and just put pen to paper \u2014 not simply digesting continuous, vapid content and calling it a life.\u201d<\/p>\n Learn more about Emily \u2014 No Prisoner Be, and buy tickets to the show, on Cal Performances\u2019 website<\/a>. Tickets are also available at the ticket office at Zellerbach Hall.<\/p>\n Listen to the full album, Emily \u2014 No Prisoner Be<\/a>, released on Jan. 30.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"portrait](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/emily-dickinson-1200-879x1024.png\")
Emily Dickinson in 1847, at age 17. <\/p>\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Dickinson-poem_he_preached_upon_breadth_till_it_argued_him_narrow_p1-2000-650x1024.jpg\")
Dickinson\u2019s poems, like the one pictured here \u2014 \u201cHe preached upon \u2018Breadth\u2019 till it argued him narrow\u201d \u2014 were filled with cross-outs and alternate words, among other markups. <\/p>\n