Emily Dickinson Blank To Blank Analysis

As Amy Burtner began her presentation I could instantly see the passion she has for her project “Blank to Blank”. Blank to Blank is a project based off of the poems written by Emily Dickinson. Amy started out by giving a background of Emily, then moving to explain her own process of how she started, and created her project, which was followed by her showing her project. For me I found it hard to follow what she was saying at different points in the presentation. However, I feel that was because she is incredibly knowledgeable about Emily Dickinson's writing, and I hadn’t heard of Emily Dickinson before. Amy began giving a background of Emily Dickinson by presenting several different statistics about her, and her writing. A few that stuck out
Amy kept using the word “lexicon” which is a dictionary. The definition she shared of lexicon was “Vocab or book containing alphabetical arrangement with a definition”. It was said that Emily’s only companion was her lexicon, her personal dictionary, which was made up by words from The Dictionary, The Bible, and Shakespeare’s writings. Amy used the word “hypertext” often through the presentation, hypertext means that something is present on the internet. Emily is known as a “19th century precursor to hypertext”, which is saying that although Emily’s poems were all written by hand they are now found all over the internet making her once analog poems now hypertext. Amy then asked the group to define the word “word”, it seemed like a simple task until I took a couple minutes to think of the definition, and couldn't think of anything. Amy presented the definition of word, which was incredibly long. The definition of the word “word” is ironic, because in order to understand the definition you must be able to understand the words being used to define the word
She gave everyone a sheet with a series of many different poems, and then asked everyone to circle repeating words, and draw lines between the repeating words to connect them. She then asked the group to raise their hand if in your poem you had a certain word that was repeated. Everyone raised their hands at different times, because everyone's poems were different, however they were all linked together by similar repeating words. Amy then explained that what we just did is what she does in her project. Amy goes through Emily’s poems finding repeating words and linking those words to more of Emily’s poems with the repeating words, showing that all of Emily’s poems connect to each other. The project has nothing to do with analyzation of the poems, it is simply to connect poems to one another. When amy started her project she only planned on doing 14 poems, she is now at 300 poems, because the words keep connecting to new poems, and it is never ending.
Overall enjoyed Amy Burtners presentation, to me it was the hardest presentation to understand that I have attended so far this semester. The context of the presentation wasn’t incredibly hard to understand, but the way Amy was presenting it without telling what her project was made it confusing to me. However, with that being said by the end of the presentation I learned a lot about Emily Dickinson as a writer.