Subject Index: Emily Dickinson conceals Iain Morrison

During his five hours, Iain read aloud nearly 300 of Emily Dickinson’s poems, taking in three sections of the Franklin 1998 edition, which groups the poems by the year that they were written. Iain wore an imitation of Dickinson’s iconic white dress and as he read, made a spreading nest of paper and plastic on which he improvised a personal map of her poems, with a nod to the ‘subject index’ in the 1955 Johnson edition of Dickinson’s work. Iain’s constructed poem-environment echoes the myths of Dickinson’s elective seclusion within domestic spaces, and the performance allows Emily Dickinson’s work to read him as a subject too, as the poet and the performer navigate together how much to reveal.