My Emily Dickinson
It’s a strange obsession, admittedly. I never considered reading all of Emily Dickinson’s poems until some time after we had Thomas Johnson’s tome migrating from tabletop to tabletop at home. My daughter, then in middle school, wanted to know more about Dickinson after we visited friends in Amherst, Massachusetts and she saw the house where Emily lived and wrote. So I tracked down The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson for her. Once with us, it was a book that stared at me a lot.
You know the type. A book that urges you to take it on every time you see it. A book that refuses to be overlooked. A book that whispers to you daily. So for years, I would pick it up, distractedly read a few poems, then set it down again. Usually in the evening, after dinner.
When I inverted my routines to be predominantly at land level in the Hudson Valley rather than high in an apartment building in New York City, Emily Dickinson’s words had already seeped in to my consciousness. I decided to read through the entire Complete Poems rather than continue cherry picking through its nearly 800 pages. It would be “fun” to read them all, I told myself. And I thought it would create a well, a reserve in me of language shapes relating to the natural world, a world I think constantly about. So I read them all. All 1775 of them. I recognize that I’m hardly the only one ever to have done so. Still, it feels like a rare accomplishment. Like an entry in a kind of club.
It took me awhile, reading five or so poems each night, flagging lines that spoke to me. I started noticing that when I would see Emily Dickinson poems cited elsewhere—they are a kind of cultural currency— I would realize, oh yes, I liked a line in that one, too. Or hmm, I read that one already but it didn’t stand out. I would sometimes then go back to a poem and see its merits anew. It was a process not of authoritative realignment so much as recognition of the determinedness of reading. Recognizing that each day I read another five or seven poems, I was reading them somewhat differently than the day before or than days to come. It made me realize that I—we—read sleepily. We read seasonally. We—I—read with an eye to things I’m doing with bees, or of observing in birds, or while thinking about the shifting sands of sexuality, gender and power, or while debating in my head the benefits of companionship versus solitude or of the vicissitudes of aging. We read through re-reading, through consideration of external sources. We read moodily. We read contentedly.
When I finally pushed through all the poems of Emily Dickinson, I turned to Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. A friend recommended it and loaned it to me, and it made me remember another friend’s deep admiration for the work of Susan Howe, a gifted poet as well as a scholar. In this book, Howe created an enchanting, experimental dialogue with people who read and think about poems and poets, and what I can only call a poet-to-poet hailing of and informed imagining of what was burning in Dickinson as she wrote. It left me both bewildered and beguiled. It made me appreciate the beauty of an open-ended interpretation as opposed to a locked down, definitive biography or critical analysis. Which is not to say that Howe’s work isn’t rigorous. It is. “It realigns consideration of the stories we can tell about Emily Dickinson, as well as her time and her writing,” is what I wrote in my journal after finishing My Emily Dickinson. I’ve also kept this passage, from p. 48 of Howe’s book, on an index card moving around my desk for the past few months since I finished reading the book:
Emily Dickinson’s religion was Poetry. As she went on through the veils of connection to the secret alchemy of Deity, she was less and less interested in temporal blessing. The decision not to publish her poems in her lifetime, to close up an extraordinary amount of work, is astonishing. Far from being the misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego, it is a consummate Calvinist gesture of self-assertion by a poet with faith to fling election loose across the incandescent shadows of futurity.
We will never fully define Dickinson and her enormous output. That’s not the point. But this week, as I remember Emily on her birthday—December 10—I know I will read more about her in the coming months, and even watch the cheeky Dickinson series on AppleTV. Her work still serves as tinder for a mid-life flashpoint in me, so I’ll delve a bit deeper into the literary world’s grappling with Emily Dickinson. (Especially this, coming soon in 2020!)
That Dickinson’s words have reached me, hailed me, improbably, across the “incandescent shadows of futurity” is an ongoing reward and a challenge. It wasn’t a forthright choice to make reading her my project. But for now at least, Emily and I are in it together.
