Tag: Emily Dickinson

Moment of Craft Fridays: Think Like a Dickinson

July 6, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 1 Comment

I just finished reading The Editing of Emily Dickinson, A Reconsideration by R. W. Franklin and Emily Dickinson, The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi. Franklin's book turned out to be interesting in detailing the problems in publishing a complete edition of Emily Dickinson poems: she created so many different variations of many of her poems, scraps left unfinished and alternate word choices expressed on many of her original papers. Defining a final "author's intent" proved impossible.

Gelpi's book attempted to place Dickinson's mindset and evolving philosophies in the context of her struggles with Puritanism and the major thought-leaders of the day, New England's writers Emerson and Thoreau. But Gelpi also had interesting things to say about how a poet-creator self-defines and he included a laundry list of craft-techniques he felt made Dickinson unique.

Gelpi believed a poet could identify as one of three kinds of a creator:

a passive see-er
an assertive genius
a skilled craftsman

Gelpi's list of Dickinsonian craft, I feel, is useful to any poet who reads Dickinson or wants to add a flair of Emily to their work:

Use unique, fresh language
Use New England colloquialisms (or your local alternative)
Drop the S from the third-person singular of the present tense
Emphasize nouns by striking the articles
Use singular nouns where plurals are expected
Make parts of speech perform unorthodox functions
Coin words
Write in hymn stanzas (quatrains of short lines with 3-4 beats)
Use dots and dashes as breathing points
Use slant rhymes
Use mostly monosyllable words

Gelphi also surmised that Dickinson liked to exist in a constantly yearning state, never to have her desires fulfilled because, as Gelphi said, "Fulfillment is static; desire is a process."

Interesting food for thought.

The Many Faces of Adrienne Rich

June 20, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

Adrienne Rich died in March at the age of 82. I had only one opportunity to meet her at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey in the late 1990s. After Rich's reading in the big tent, I stood in line to get my only book of hers, An Atlas of the Difficult World, Poems 1988-1991, signed. She greeted every reader with a friendly smile, until she reached me. I got that stern-lipped cold stare you see to the left. It's as if she didn't approve of me at all. It's as if she knew I hadn't even read the book yet. I came away a little unsettled and my friends laughed about how pissy she looked signing my book. That incident never endeared me to her.

Then was the fact that I was a Riot Grrrl sort of feminist (that is to say third wave) and Rich was a second wave feminist. The 3rd wave girls have always butted heads with the 2nd wave women. Even our insistence on self-referring as girls irked those 2nd wavers.

Then there were those poems of hers we read in poetry class, the ones I could never quite get under my skin, like "Diving Into the Wreck." In a recent class we read "Blue Rock", "Edges," "Poetry: I," "Poetry: II, Chicago," "Poetry: III," and "To a Poet." I have nary a check mark near the title of any of them. Even their dry titles cause my nethers to feel a bit dehydrated.

It might at first seem extraordinary how Rich's "look" morphed over the years in these photographs. But those thin stern lips always identify her, even when she's smiling.

Today I'm re-evaluating.

I have to say the divide between the 2nd and 3rd wavers has somewhat died down now. We're beginning to see our mothers and daughters without so much rebellion, resentment and misunderstanding.

And I realize deep down that Adrienne Rich's sourpuss face that day probably had more to do with a lifetime of frustration against those who disapproved of not only her sexuality but her literary campaigns on behalf of her sexuality, the trauma left by the gunshot suicide of her economist husband back in 1970, or the constant rheumatoid arthritis she suffered all her adult life, complications of which finally ended it.

And this week I finally found an Adrienne Rich poem I liked…in the Emily Dickinson book, The Mind of the Poet, I just picked up at the Highlands library. The poem is simple titled "E." in Gelpi's book but later Rich must have changed the title to "I Am in Danger—Sir—"

The last stanza:

and in your halfcracked way you chose
silence for entertainment
chose to have it out at last
on your own premises.

Which speaks not only to Dickinson herself but to the way all feminists choose to have it out at last on their own premises.

Read the full Emily Dickinson tribute here: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Rich_IAmInDangerSir.pdf

Read the New York Times profile of Adrienne Rich ("a poet of towering reputation and towering rage") when she died:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html?pagewanted=all

Old Books About Emily Dickinson

June 18, 2012 / Big Bang Poetry / 0 Comments

I was at the Highlands University Library this morning in Las Vegas, New Mexico, trying to track down a 1933 thesis written by J. W. Wilferth called "An Economic History of Harding County, New Mexico" for a story I'm researching. I had to sit down and read the thing in one sitting but it turned out to be what I would call an amazing document of mid-depression, pre-Dust Bowl community-denial about dry land farming.

But in any case, I was also looking for the novel The Hi Lo Country by Max Evans, also written about the high plains of northeastern New Mexico. To get to that book, my husband inadvertently lured me through the library's section of literary criticism. Heaven help me. It pained me not to have time to look through all the old biographies and tomes of dusty literary thought.

I did sneak out these two books which look promising:

Emily Dickinson, The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi from 1965: Gelpi says in the introduction his attempt is to bring together biography with textual analysis. Sounds fun!

The Editing of Emily Dickinson, A Reconsideration by R. W. Franklin from 1967: It seems Franklin will take me through every edit ever made to every edition of Dickinson's poems. Except the photos of her original manuscript, I'm reconsidering reading it.

Check out the Daily Dickinson