New In November!

I wish all of you the best as we enter the month of November (Sheesh, where has 2011 gone?). Anyway, on this first day of a new month I'm kind of excited, for myself and for my literary blog, ProSe, to announce that I'm going to be starting two projects that I hope will be of interest to some of you. I have been thinking about both of these projects for a while, and have finally decided to roll them out.

Amherst College Archives

The first project I am introducing is going to be a weekly posting entitled the Dickinson Project, where I plan to feature a selected poem from among the nearly 1,800 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote, and then offer some thoughts and commentary associated with that poem. I also want to place Emily Dickinson and her poetry in the context of her time, and bring in some of the other arts and literature of her contemporaries. Emily Dickinson's poetry has always been very important to me, and I hope to be able to successfully share my love and enthusiasm for her poetry with all of you through this weekly feature.

The second writing project is also poetry-related, and will feature a weekly posting of one of Shakespeare's sonnets. I am going to start with Sonnet No. 1 and then, week-by-week, move through all 154 of them. Again, I hope to provide some interesting thoughts and/or commentary and related information in these postings. I am really looking forward to this project too, as I have yet to read each and every one of Shakespeare's sonnets. In fact, I'll wager that I've probably only read 25-30% of them, so this is going to be a wonderful new learning experience for me too.

I am hoping that both of these weekly features become somewhat of a signature item for ProSe over the next three or four years. Personally, I think it will be a great way for me to intellectually challenge myself and learn more about both of these literary giants, and be able to do something with my blog other than simply reviewing the books I happen to be reading. I am under no pretensions that I am doing anything remotely original with either of these projects, as I am quite sure that there are plenty of bloggers out there who've posted about Dickinson's poetry and Shakespeare's sonnets. That's okay! I really am doing this solely for my own gratification, and I am hoping that some of the rest of you may get some enjoyment from it too.

So, what do you think? Would you like the opportunity to learn more about the poetry of Dickinson and Shakespeare on a weekly basis here on ProSe? I hope so, because here it comes!