I guess Billy Collins has a thing for Emily Dickinson. He got my attention this morning with his reading of David Ray's At Emily's in Amherst. That immediately called to mind his own poem, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes, which I heard Garrison Keillor read on the program in 2001. Ray mentions "the white dress with pearl buttons;" Collins writes of
Together they reminded me of this interview with Annie Leibovitz in which Emily Dickinson's dress and its "alabaster" buttons make a brief appearance.the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back