{"id":8665,"date":"2008-12-06T05:55:39","date_gmt":"2008-12-06T10:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8665"},"modified":"2022-10-16T12:45:52","modified_gmt":"2022-10-16T16:45:52","slug":"the-books-the-norton-anthology-of-modern-and-contemporary-poetry-emily-dickinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=8665","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cThe Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry\u201d \u2013 Emily Dickinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry<\/p>\n

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair<\/p>\n

I gotta be honest.<\/p>\n

EMILY DICKINSON FREAKS ME OUT.<\/p>\n

I can’t settle into her poems and flip through the pages of her volumes with satisfaction and happiness and enjoyment of the verse. It’s all too jagged for me. It’s too raw. The long dashes in her lines, the lack of titles, the fact that she wrote all of this with the assumption that they would not be read – so there is a dashed-off immediate quality to almost all of it … like she would be sweeping the parlor, an entire poem would pop into her brain full-blown about, oh, death, or love, or fear – and she would stop sweeping, jot it down on a scrap of paper she kept in a pocket of her dress, and then go back to sweeping. Like that’s what all of her poems feel like to me, and it freaks me out. There is a great mystery surrounding Emily Dickinson (what happened to her? Why did she become a recluse?) and I, for one, hope the mystery is never solved. I enjoy reading the theories, I enjoy speculating … but I think I like the mystery better.<\/p>\n

She CAN’T have really existed, can she?<\/p>\n

Here is Ted’s post on Emily Dickinson<\/a>. Ted and I collaborated, years ago, on a show about Joseph Cornell (my post about him here<\/a>) who made some of his most famous “boxes” for Emily Dickinson (even though she was long dead). The entire cast immersed itself in Dickinson’s work, looking at it in a whole new way – trying to see it through Cornell’s eyes. Here is one of his most famous boxes, made for Emily Dickinson – it is called “Towards the Blue Peninsula”.<\/p>\n

The Emily Dickinson boxes usually involve a caged space, like for a parrot, with an open window in the background. He is creating for her a lovely cage. But the window is open, the blue sky is beyond. Has she escaped? The box is haunting.<\/p>\n

I went through a big Emily Dickinson phase in high school, even though she freaked me out even then. I remember being devastated once – I think I had asked a guy to the prom and he said no. I had cried for 24 hours. It was a tragedy. Friends called me up to comfort me. I wailed into the night. The next day I was exhausted from all the crying. And I wrote in my journal, “After great pain a formal feeling comes.”<\/p>\n

HAHAHAHAHAHA<\/p>\n

Like, yeah, I think Emily Dickinson might have been talking about something a bit more wrenching than not going to the Prom – but still! I remember vividly the feeling of being washed out, and almost timid and quiet in the aftermath of all the tears – and I realized that I did feel rather “formal”. She was right!<\/p>\n

But still. It makes me laugh to think of today.<\/p>\n

Camille Paglia in her giant book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson<\/a>\"\"<\/i> covers Emily Dickinson – as a matter of fact, it is the final chapter. I highly recommend that book anyway – there’s a lot in it that is silly, but boy is it fun to read. I love her. Her view of Dickinson as almost an aesthete, or a decadent … someone addicted to the sensations<\/i> of life … and yet her outer life was this quiet reclusive life … but inside, she was like the Marquis de Sade. It’s an interesting theory and actually, reading her poems in that light – it is all sensation, overlaid with the universal – but when Dickinson writes about pain, she writes about briars and thorns and cold – when she writes about love she writes about sunshine and green and warmth … It is all in the senses. Connected by little dashes that make each poem seem breathless. She is bombarded by sensation, feeling … it sweeps over her like a wave.<\/p>\n

Again, she seems virtually impossible to me. I love her for it.<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt wrote, in his wonderful book Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"<\/i> (which I’ll get to when I get to in this book excerpt thing):<\/p>\n

She sewed her poems into little books and put them away, one after another, in a box, where after her death her sister found them, nine hundred poems “tied together with twine” in “sixty volumes.” And it’s not an untenable theory that the beloved whom she mourns, departed, may be Christ, the soul’s lover, rather than a particular man — or a particular woman.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Her poems vibrate with pain, feeling, thought, humor. She scares the shit out of me. The emotional life is a vast universe. You don’t have to travel widely to “have a life”. You don’t have to have tons of experiences. You are alive. What does it feel like to be alive? That’s the place Emily Dickinson writes from.<\/p>\n

Here’s a poem.<\/p>\n

\n214<\/u><\/p>\n

\nI taste a liquor never brewed —
\nFrom Tankards scooped in Pearl —
\nNot all the Vats upon the Rhine
\nYield such an Alcohol!<\/p>\n

Inebriate of Air – am I —
\nAnd Debauchee of Dew —
\nReeling — thro endless summer days —
\nFrom inns of Molten Blue —<\/p>\n

When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
\nOut of the Foxglove’s door —
\nWhen Butterflies – renounce their “drams” —
\nI shall but drink the more!<\/p>\n

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats —
\nAnd Saints – to windows run —
\nTo see the little Tippler
\nLeaning against the — Sun —<\/p>\n

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