Emily Dickinson at Poets House

Poets House is a two-story structure dedicated to verse. Astonished? It's incredibly difficult to believe that such a place could exist in Lower Manhattan, or anywhere in the United States in the early twenty-first century. Every time we're there, we pinch ourselves, as if only a sharp pain or purply bruise could prove that this place --- where anyone who enters can grab a book from the library of 50,000 volumes of poetry and read --- exists. 
  
Going on right now, an exhibit devoted to Emily Dickinson, including quilts that derive their pattern from her punctuation, manuscripts, letters, and other scraps of paper ephemera, a celebration of both the 25th anniversary of Poets House and this particular poet. Here's the poet alive in print, scrawling a condolence, a take on the Bible, a recipe for coconut cake.

Once we saw this, our plans for the rest of the day were set: hustle home along the Hudson, with a quick stop at Gristedes, a few minutes of poking about the Internet, a few more minutes of mixing, and a coconut loaf, with a good moist crumb. Writing and baking aren't that dissimilar: in both activities, you take a finite amount of ingredients (letters, foodstuff), and combine. Then you wait, hoping for the best.     

Modified recipe here: thanks