a quite unsober take on emily dickinson

Taking an American Poetry & Poetics class this semester. We started with Poe, worked our way through Whitman, then Emily Dickinson. Now we're at Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and H.D. The class is everything I'd hoped -- insightful and passionate instruction, insightful and passionate discussion. Much contention. Contention is good. It's such a joy to watch people getting angry with one another over their presentations of poetry & poetics. Why? I suppose because it affirms that I'm not the only freak who feels passionate about this stuff.

Prior to this class, I'd never had such a close encounter with Emily Dickinson. We read a ton of her poems. I found myself moved, touched, flabbergasted, perplexed, startled, amazed, confounded by all of them. I'm on the verge of declaring Emily Dickinson my favorite poet of all time. Not sure that will stick, but I must say that the modernism of Marianne Moore and company strikes me as tedious, pretentious, and cynical relative to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I'm sure I'll learn to find something worthwhile in the modernists -- but for now, I'm still under Dickinson's spell.

What follows is a quite unsober account of how I read Dickinson's deeply unsual punctuation in light of Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson.

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I wanted to roughly sketch something that struck me while reading Howe's My Emily Dickinson. I’m not sure it’s at all supportable via Howe’s text -- and I'm making quite a few connections that probably aren't justified -- but what struck me has nevertheless affected my reading of Dickinson’s uses of the dash.

On p. 21-22 of Howe’s text, she states the following:

Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philosophy from alien territory, a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to sick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking. “He may pause but he must not hesitate” – Riskin. Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building . . . He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition . . .

At the center of Indifference I feel my own freedom . . . the Liberty in wavering. Compression of possibility tensing to spring.

Perhaps because I was wondering about the dashes just before I read this section, it seemed to me that when Howe talked about HESITATION she was (or could be) talking about the dashes. Suddenly I could see each dash as a site of this compression of possibility tensing to spring.” Each time a dash interrupts a line or a phrase, Emily Dickinson opens the poem (and opens us as readers) to a field of radical, even absolute, possibility. The philosophers Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, in their book What is Philosophy?, discusses an image in which each of carries around an umbrella to shield us from the radical openness – or, in their view, chaos or absolute difference – of the sky overhead. This umbrella is the coherent, stable (fiction of a) world that we navigate day to day. Artists, they claim, make a little tear in the fabric of that umbrella -- not to eliminate the umbrella all together (which would result in madness) but to let through a little bit of the vastness that lies on the other side.

I was reminded of this “other side of the umbrella” by the following in Howe’s text:

This is the process of viewing Emptiness without design or plan, neighborless in winter blank, or blaze of summer. This is waste wilderness. Nature no soothing mother, Nature is annihilation brooding over. (p. 21).

At each dash, then, we might say that the poem stutters, hesitates before this Emptiness – and it seems, at times – especially when the dash appears in the middle of a line -- that nearly anything might follow. It’s as if the infinity of this Emptiness, this Indifference, inevitably overflows our expectations and pours itself into the sheer possibility of “what comes after the dash” – such that we could read each dash as inscription of the Emptiness itself, as an inscription of the very “Compression of possibility” from which the next word or words will “spring”.

Thinking on this, I’m intrigued by Dickinson’s relationship to the “Emptiness without design”. At times, she seems perfectly at home, almost a peer, of this vast otherness. “My Business is Circumference”, she tells Higgins. She alone rides “Beyond the Dip of Bell” in poem 142 (376):

I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched –
I felt the Columns close –
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –
I touched the Universe –

And back it slid – and I alone –
A Speck upon a Ball –
Went out upon Circumference –
Beyond the Dip of Bell –

And the respect she receives from the Sea (?) in poem 209 (520):

Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –

Yet the Sea, in the same poem, nearly drowns her, eternity consistently overwhelms her, she speaks in poem 500 (1405) of “a Universe’s facture”, in poem 206 (512) of the Soul’s “Bandaged Moments”:

The Souls has Bandaged moments –
When too appalled to stir –
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her –

and in poem 177 (449) even Beauty and Truth (or at least their names – without which, one could argue, they would remain inaccessible to thought) are erased by the creeping moss in their adjoining tombs:

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –
We talked between the Rooms –
Until the Moss had reached our lips –
And covered up – our names –

She not only rides “Beyond the Dip of Bell”, then, but eternity, infinite Emptiness, also overwhelms, invades, fractures. Each dash, each hesitation, then, we might read as the site of such a facture. In her poems, the infinite invades language, breaks it, fractures it – only to have her re-set those fractures in order to compose something wholly original.