Author in Qalma
Emily Dickinson
1830–1886
Biography
Emily Dickinson spent most of her adult life in her family's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published almost nothing while she lived. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, tied them into small hand-bound booklets, and left them in her dresser. Her poems are compressed to a degree that feels almost violent: every word load-bearing, every dash a small held breath. She wrote about death with a detective's curiosity and about consciousness as though mapping a country. After her death her sister found the booklets and fought to have them published; she is now considered one of the most original poets in the English language.
Why Emily Dickinson belongs in Qalma
Emily Dickinson belongs in Qalma because she made a lifetime of work in private, for no audience, and it lost nothing for it. That is the quiet permission Qalma is built around.
“Forever is composed of nows.”
Emily Dickinson · Poem 690 · c. 1863
A reflection
This line compresses her whole approach to time into five words: the huge idea of forever is just a pile of present instants, stacked one after another. Most days slip by while we wait for something else to start. Try treating today's nows as the actual material of your life, pick one ordinary stretch and pay attention to it as if it counts, because by this poem, it is the only kind of time there is.
Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 1955.
Emily Dickinson is one of the voices behind Qalma's visual journal app. Explore the daily reflection app, or return to the home page.
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