THE EMILY DICKINSON INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY

Volume 30, Number 1 May/June 2018 “The Only News I know / Is Bulletins all Day / From Immortality.” The Wicks they stimulate If vital light

Inhere as do the Suns By In This Issue

Officers President: Martha Nell Smith Series 20 A Tribute to Richard Wilbur Vice-President: Barbara Mossberg By Judith Farr Secretary: Nancy List Pridgen 4 Poet to Poet Treasurer: James C. Fraser Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, Emily Dickinson, and 23 An Appreciation of Lucie Brock-Broido “Awe” By Tom Daley Board Members By Eleanor Heginbotham Series Editor, Jonnie Guerra Reviews Faith Barrett Páraic Finnerty Eliza Richards Renée Bergland James C. Fraser Martha Nell Smith 10 Dickinson Scholars 26 New Publications George Boziwick Michelle Kohler Brooke Steinhauser Fixed Points and Widening Diameters: On Albert Renée Bergland, Book Review Editor Antoine Cazé Barbara Mossberg (Honorary Member) Gelpi Paul Crumbley Elizabeth Petrino Marta Werner By Enikö Bollobás 29 Enikő Bollobás, Vendégünk a végtelenből. Emily Stephanie Farrar Vivian Pollak Jane Wald (Honorary Member) Series Editor, Cindy Mackenzie Dickinson költészete [Our Visitor from Infinitude. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry]. 13 Teaching Dickinson By Pál Hegyi Legal Advisor: Louis N. Levine Local Chapters Committee Chair: Eleanor Heginbotham Finding a Context for Teaching Dickinson Nominations Committee Chair: Páraic Finnerty Arts Committee Chair: Barbara Dana By Páraic Finnerty 30 O eu, o outro e o mundo / The Self, the Other, and Membership Committee Chair: Elizabeth Petrino Emily Dickinson Journal Editor: James Guthrie Series Editor, Marianne Noble the World By George Monteiro Editor, EDIS Bulletin: Daniel Manheim Features Sustaining Members Members’ News 8 White Heat Mary Elizabeth Bernard Scott Donaldson Trisha Kannan An Interview with Ivy Schweitzer 31 New EDIS Board Member-At-Large, Li-Hsin Hsu Richard Brantley Jane D. Eberwein Helen Koukoutsis Diane K. Busker Robert Eberwein Cristanne Miller Antoine Cazé Judith Farr Barbara Mossberg 15 Emily Dickinson’s Prescient Stages of Grief 33 Hope is the Thing with Numbers Richard Brantley David H. Forsyth Martha Nell Smith By Daphne Thompson By Bill Sweet James C. Fraser 17 Thomas Dwight Gilbert’s Useful Career 35 EDIS ANNUAL MEETING 2018 By Jo Ann Orr and Dan Manheim Emily Dickinson: In the Company of Others Contributing Members Felicia Nimue Ackerman Linda Healy Marianne Noble Carolyn L. Cooley Eleanor Heginbotham Eliza Richards Barbara Dana Suzanne Juhasz George T. Slone Front Cover: In addition to Eleanor Heginbotham’s interview/essay on Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, this issue includes Marie Esteve Rita Brady Kiefer Ethan Tarasov two memorial tributes to poets who found a creative ancestor in Dickinson: Richard Wilbur and Lucie Brock-Broido. Susan J. Goldwitz Niels Kjaer Robin Tarasov LeeAnn Gorthey Eleanor Linafelt Hiroko Uno Back Cover: In the “Noted with Pleasure” department, the fragmentary manuscript of “How soft the Caterpillar steps” Sharon Hamilton Daniel Manheim Lingling Xiang Greg Mattingly (Fr1523; AC manuscript #229), should serve as another reminder that every poem Dickinson wrote may be “intent upon its circuit quaint,” regardless of how it is represented in print. EDIS gratefully acknowledges the generous financial contributions of these members.

EDIS Bulletin (ISSN 1055-3932) is published twice yearly, May/June and November/December, by The Emily Dickinson International Society, Inc. Standard Mail non-prof- it postage is paid at Lexington, KY 40511. Membership in the Society is open to all persons with an interest in Emily Dickinson and her work. For further information, The Assistant Editor for this issue is Allyson Weglar contact Martha Nell Smith, President, EDIS, Department of English, 2119 Tawes Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, or [email protected]. Annual dues are $50.00 for regular members, $30.00 for students, $200.00 for sustaining members, $113.00 for institutional members, $100.00 for contributing members (all of Dickinson poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from the following volumes: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. whom receive the Bulletin and the Emily Dickinson Journal), or $20.00 for associate members (Bulletin only). Membership inquiries should be directed to James C. Fraser, Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; The 159 Prospect St., Apt 7, Acton, MA, 01720-3654, USA. Membership applications and changes of address should be sent to The Emily Dickinson International Society, Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President c/o Johns Hopkins University Press, P.O. Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211-0966, USA. Direct changes of address to [email protected], 800-548-1784 (U.S. and Fellows of Harvard College; The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, and Canada), or 410-516-6987; fax to 410-516-3866. Address submissions for the Bulletin to Daniel Manheim, Centre College, 600 West Walnut St., Danville, KY 40422, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Copyright © 1929, 1935 by Mar- USA or [email protected]. Submission deadlines are March 1 (Spring issue) and September 1 (Fall issue). All articles become the property of the Bulletin. Back tha Dickinson Bianchi, Copyright © renewed 1957, 1963 by Mary L. Hampson: Little Brown and Co., Boston. Dickinson letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers issues are available for $5.00 each from the editor. Copyright © 2018 by The Emily Dickinson International Society, Inc. The Bulletin is indexed in EBSCO, Humanities from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986 by the President International Complete, and the MLA Bibliography. and Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary L. Hampson. www.emilydickinsoninternationalsociety.org 2 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 3 Poet to Poet Poet to Poet

Jonnie Guerra, Series Editor loween (OL 36). No reader of the Bulletin needs reminders of Although Smith’s poetry differs from Dickinson’s by its Dickinson’s similarly persistent questions, especially those of profound concern with social issues – more “we” than “I,” her early letters. as critic Derek Gromadzki puts it – it also sometimes is * * * stunningly evocative of the poet who first inspired her. For Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, Emily Dickinson, and “Awe” example, the opening lines of the first poem, “Something Like Like Emily, who delighted in her web of Dickinson and Dying, Maybe,” in The Body’s Question: Poems (hereafter Norcross family connections, Tracy values ties with cousins BQ) are emblematic of Smith’s interest in familiar Dickinson By Eleanor Heginbotham and siblings, particularly an older, influential brother. Tracy’s terrain, the state between sleeping and waking, life and death: feelings for her parents were appreciative and loving, yet It is my pleasure to feature United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith in the Poet to Poet series. Smith is the author of four volumes of complicated, in part because, like the Dickinsons, the Smiths Last night, it was bright afternoon poetry, The Body’s Question: Poems (2003), Duende Poems (2007), Life on Mars (2011), and Wade in the Water (2018), all published were more unquestioning in their religious faith than their Where I wandered. Pale faces all around me. by Graywolf Press. At the center of Smith’s most recent collection, just released in April, is a Civil War suite based on the experience of poet-daughter. Both poets became closer to their mothers I walked and walked looking for a door, black soldiers and their families during and after the war. Smith also is the author of Ordinary Light: A Memoir (2015), published by as they attended them to their deaths, mind meeting mind For some cast-off garment, looking for myself Vintage Books, Penguin Random House. A special thanks to Eleanor Heginbotham, professor emerita of Concordia University St. Paul, “by tunneling,” as it were. Smith’s parents emerge as vivid, In the blank windows and the pale blank faces. for providing Bulletin readers with an enthusiastic account of the Smith-Dickinson connection in the essay that follows. complex subjects in Ordinary Light. From an Alabama town (BQ 3) named Sunflower, Floyd William Smith (1935-2008), became an optical engineer on the Hubble telescope. He may not have The horrifying image of the speaker searching for a familiar h my. If Emily appeared in my class, I would be in awe, gether different, the first stanza of that poem, by Emily Dick- rung church bells to encourage neighbors to see a sunset as door, met with “pale blank faces,” may well remind Dickin- Oin awe of her quiet authority, her fearless willingness to inson, would pop into the front of my mind, drawing me into Edward Dickinson reputedly did, but the young Tracy was son readers of “I Years had been from Home” (Fr440). I also imagine things like eternity and the life of the soul. If she mischievous collusion with the speaker: Then there’s a pair of “swept up in the fantasy that my father and I were members see strong similarities to Dickinson in the gothic sensibility of were my student, I would step back and enjoy her.” On the us! / Don’t tell!” (OL 145-146) of the same royal court” as they listened to music and danced Smith’s house images in the poem “Ash,” first published in the phone from her New Jersey office, Tracy K. Smith, director on Saturdays (OL 13). He outlived his wife, Kathryn (1936- November 23, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, included in Wade of Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and the Now, decades later, having received the highest accolades pos- 1994), whose death is the climax of Smith’s memoir. Tracy’s in the Water, and reprinted at the end of this article. newest Poet Laureate of the United States, answers my wildly sible for poets – the Pulitzer Prize, for Life on Mars; three record of her reaction to her mother’s death recalls Emily’s suppositional first question during our November 28, 2017 awards for Duende Poems (the Whiting, the James Laughlin, reflections when Emily Norcross Dickinson died: Smith selected this poem for the holograph to distribute to interview. and the Essence magazine’s Literary Award for Poetry); the the audience at The Folger Theatre’s 2016 Emily Dickinson Academy Fellowship given by the Academy of American Po- And then the fact of her death – no, not simply the fact of Birthday Tribute. Indeed, on that occasion, Smith’s selection Smith had, of course, already acknowledged Dickinson’s pow- ets; and more – she reflected on what she owes to and shares her death but rather the facts of her death and her life; her of poems to read and her discussion of them reflected both her erful influence many times in her with Dickinson. presence in this world and the presence of her absence made affinity with Dickinson and the uniqueness of her own voice. volumes of poetry and Nation- the whole of what I remembered or lacked; everything she Because her Pulitzer-award-winning Life on Mars (hereafter al Book Award finalist memoir, Smith’s memoir reveals deep gave and left and what, in leaving, she took – the fact of all LM) reflects the universe beyond Earth, the vast spaces visible Ordinary Light (hereafter OL), connections. To begin with, as that, like a column of thread and promise and light, would with the telescope on which Smith’s father worked, the Folger in which she described her first the youngest of five by a num- flare bright and hot in my mind (OL 329). teamed Smith with astronomer David DeVorkin, also a poet. meeting with Dickinson: ber of years, Tracy was encour- The title poem of this volume, which Dan Chiasson described aged to explore the large library Of course, many circumstances of Smith’s world and experi- in his 2011 review as a “wild, far ranging elegy” for Smith’s “From the moment I saw it, sit- collected by her reading fami- ence have been vastly different from Dickinson’s. Although father, weaves together passages about torture at Abu Ghraib, ting toward the bottom of a page ly. Her memoir, in fact, begins Tracy was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, about 150 miles horrifying snippets of ugly, actual news like the kidnapping in our reader, I couldn’t help but with a description of the oak from Amherst, she was raised in California suburbs, far from and rape of a child, and a bleak conversation between two memorize a poem whose meter bookshelves and what they con- the southern roots of her parents who shared with her stories women that calls to mind women coming and going in a world had worked upon me quickly and tained that her parents and sib- of the Civil Rights struggles of their southern relatives. She even bleaker than Prufrock’s. The use of such referential detail in a way I couldn’t yet under- lings “pushed” her to read. No attended Harvard, where she was influenced by, among oth- is, of course, not typical of Dickinson. What does evoke Dick- stand. Its rhyme scheme cement- one warned her to avoid books ers, Seamus Heaney, Henri Cole, and Dickinson interpreters inson is Smith’s meditation on the earth near the poem’s end: ed, for me, a new sense of inevi- that might “joggle the mind,” Lucie Brock-Broido and Helen Vendler. She also joined the tability, allowing the lines to slip and the wide variety she read Dark Room Collective, a group of established and emerging The earth beneath us. The earth easily into my ear and stay there: did goad her questioning mind. African American poets. That – and years at Columbia Uni- Around and above. The earth “How many worlds were there, versity, where she earned her MFA, and at Stanford as a Steg- Pushing up against our houses, I’m Nobody! Who are you?. . . and what did they want from us, ner Fellow; two marriages (her husband, Raphael Allison, is Complicit with gravity. The earth there, in our houses, under the a scholar of 20th century poetry); three children; and now the Ageless watching us rise and curl. Every now and then, when I was low roofs of our lives?” wonders high-profile status of Poet Laureate – distinguish her life from Our spades, our oxen, the jagged lines thinking about something alto- Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths the five-year-old Tracy on Hal- Dickinson’s. We carve into dirt. The earth

4 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 5 Poet to Poet Poet to Poet

Nicked and sliced into territory. History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Arranging them into collections is a way of high- Hacked and hollowed. Stoppered tight. Corners, will be replaced with nuance, lighting this sense of conversation. It also broad- Tripwire. […] ens our sense of what individual poems are say- Ash The earth floating in darkness, * * * ing on their own.” She could be speaking about suspended in spin. . . . Weightless, unhinged, Dickinson’s fascicles. As her own poetry attests, The earth gunning it around the sun. Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift she reveres Dickinson’s respect for language, “her Strange house we must keep and fill. The earth we plunder like thieves . . . In the haze of space, which will be, once devotion and submission to what carefully and House that eats and pleads and kills. The earth coming off on our shoes. lovingly arranged language can render” as though House on legs. House on fire. House infested (LM 40-41) And for all, scrutable and safe. the poet is “listening to something not necessar- With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house. (LM 7) ily elected, straining toward a truth she did not As in this passage, Smith’s entire collection resonates with the know she knew.” Dickinson’s willingness to ex- House of trick and suck and shrug skepticism blended with triumphant tones of Emily Dickinson, “Sci-Fi” is followed by an astonishingly word-luscious plore “the soul,” to direct her imagination toward Give-it-to-me house. I-need-you-baby house. who marvels over “Arcturus,” that brightest of stars in the poem in tercets, “My God, It’s Full of Stars.” In that poem that which is “silent, unsayable” is the courageous House whose rooms are pooled with blood. north, wondering “if the ‘poles’ should frisk about / And stand Smith imagines heaven as a library, where “The books have goal of Smith’s own poetry. House with hands. House of guilt. House opon their heads!” (Fr117) and, elsewhere, about the Pleiades, lived . . . all along, belonging / for weeks at a time to one or That other houses built. House of lies Mercury, Saturn, and Orion. In fact, the major metaphors of another in the brief sequences / Of family names, speaking (at telescope and sight or lack thereof, of whirling planets and night mostly) to a face, // A pair of eyes” (LM 8). Imagine if And pride and bone. House afraid to be alone. more link Smith’s Life on Mars with, among the many other Dickinson were reading these poems today: I think she would House like an engine that churns and stalls. voices it contains, Dickinson’s. be feeling the top of her head coming off, as she pondered the House with skin and hair for walls. problems and savored the possibilities of 21st century life in Works Consulted House the seasons singe and douse. “Life on Mars” spreads its existential imagery and her own Amherst, the site, during her lifetime, of both cutting- House that believes it is not a house. dissociations over six pages, lines linked to others through edge astronomical discoveries and the recurrence of religious Charles, Ron. “New U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. slant rhyme (e.g., “forth” / “surf”), assonance, consonance, fervor. Smith Reports for Duty.” Washington Post, 9 Sept. repetition; the effect mirrors the central image. It is followed 2017. “Ash” copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. by a villanelle, “Solstice,” that opens with a Dickinsonian Smith spoke wistfully during our November phone conversa- Reprinted from Wade in the Water with the permission jolt as in, say, “A Toad, can die of Light” (Fr419). “They’re tion of the value of those rare times of privacy, when she has Chiasson, Dan. “Other Worlds: New Poems by of the author and Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. gassing geese outside of JFK,” begins Smith’s intricate the “space to disappear into language,” to see what it might Tracy K. Smith and Dana Levin.” The New Yorker, 8 poem, which juxtaposes a meditation on euthanizing geese “unfold for me.” About her stunning metaphors, she said, Aug. 2011. with news of the 2009 presidential election in Iran. That “metaphor can pull you farther from the literal; the distortions concatenation of imagery, imagery that veers between the that [figurative] language invokes can have the unusual effect Gromadzki, Derek. “Tracy K. Smith.” DLB, 372: theological, the scientific, and hard news, evokes Dickinson’s of pulling us closer to the emotional truth of a situation,” and 233-249. Long-time EDIS member and frequent Bulletin contributor Eleanor Hegin- images of her world collapsing like a tent and speakers falling she spoke of her “intense wonder,” on a good day: when lines botham is the author of Reading Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in from plank to plank as disruptions such as the Civil War thrust labored over also surprise her and she asks, “how could that “Tracy K. Smith Talks to Gregory Pardlo On Poetry, Possibilities (2003). She had the good fortune to meet Tracy K. Smith when traditionally accepted ideas and practices into doubt during come out of me?” She is at least as much in wonder at the Manifestos, and David Bowie.” Literary Hub, 29 the Poet Laureate was giving the introductory talk at the Library of Congress Emily’s lifetime. process as at the product of her work. As she told Gregory Oct. 2015. Web. last September. Pardlo, “every poem, no matter its specific terms, is seeking to Doubts similar to Dickinson’s appear throughout Life on Mars, collapse the distance between seemingly disparate or incom- as in “The Weather in Space,” the opening poem, which be- patible things. I think that’s what metaphor is doing; at its best, gins with these questions: “Is God being or pure force? The it’s not working to reproduce a literal sense . . . it’s striving wind / Or what commands it?” Many of the poems that follow for purposeful distortion. . . . That sense of distortion is what Emily Dickinson Undergraduate Essay Prize present shocking glimpses of the life on this earth. “Sci-Fi,” gives us access to the true strangeness in our most powerful inspired by Smith’s watching Truffaut’s version of Bradbury’s feelings.” Farenheit 451 and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, offers The Emily Dickinson International Society offers a prize for undergraduate research on Emily Dickinson. We seek critical essays glimpses of what is and what might be. However, I also detect Much of the conversation with Pardlo and many other articles by undergraduates from institutions of all kinds, focusing on Dickinson’s poems or letters. Students at all levels are eligible to an ars poetica compatible with Dickinson’s aesthetics and the about Smith call to mind Dickinson’s aesthetics. In response submit. Papers should be 15 pages maximum. The winning essay will be published on the EDIS website, and the author will “circumference” toward which she yearned: to my question about whether the order of poems in her own receive an award of $100. chapbooks was intentional, Smith said, “I feel like poems are There will be no edges, but curves. always speaking to each other. Sometimes the conversation To submit an essay for the prize, send copies of articles as anonymous word attachments, plus a cover letter with contact infor- Clean lines pointing only forward they seem to be carrying on among themselves is surprising. mation to the following address by June 30, 2018: [email protected]. The essays will be distributed electronically to a panel of nationally recognized scholars for judging. All submissions will be acknowledged and receive a response within a month.

6 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 7 project: Schweitzer says she wants “to show to take full advantage of the capacity to link fection and respect for them – they are very White Heat readers the form, the structure, the handwrit- from site to site. “I am trying to link things,” lucky to be working on this project. But as ing, and the fascicle context” of the poems, “so she explains, “so that the encyclopedia and Schweitzer continues to talk about her vision Last January, Dartmouth professor and EDIS member Ivy Schweitzer sent the following message to a friend on the Board: “I am happy they can do their own reading.” the lexicon – and many other resources – are for public humanities, what shines through is to announce the beginning of my new digital project, White Heat, a weekly blog of the year 1862 in the life of Emily Dickinson. The url always at your fingertips. I want to create that she respects her distant readers – far-flung is sites.dartmouth.edu/whiteheat/. . . . We would like participants – faculty, students, fans – who would like to serve as guest responders At the same time, the blog offers an opportu- entry-points into the nineteenth century.” scholars, undergraduates, amateurs and fans, to the weekly blog. This does not require much. We would send you the blog a week in advance and ask you to compose some kind of nity to think about the temporal context – to as much as her own students. The point of her response. It doesn’t have to be scholarly or academic, or even in writing. That’s the beauty of a digital project.” A few weeks later Ivy read some of the newspapers and articles that There are plenty of good archival websites on project is to open the nineteenth-century poetic sat down with Bulletin book review editor Renée Bergland, happily also a Hanover resident and some-time Dartmouth instructor. What Dickinson might have been reading in 1862. Dickinson – Schweitzer particularly admires world of Emily Dickinson to every reader who follows is Renée’s account of their conversation about White Heat. Schweitzer says she is trying to find the bal- the Emily Dickinson Archive, the Dickinson is interested. Schweitzer says, “I think of this ance of timely and timeless: “I want to show Electronic Archive, the Classroom Electric, as Public Humanities. I want to make Dickin- f Emily Dickinson were of her responses would be the Dickinson who is both of her own moment and the Prowling Bee. “I am addicted to the son’s world attractive, to work at linking her Ialive today, would she creative, and thought maybe and also speaks to us now.” Schweitzer has Emily Dickinson Archive,” she confesses. world to ours. It’s important to think about the tweet? Although her talents by the end of the year she come to love reading the Springfield Republi- “It is an amazing tool.” Her own project is self in war, the poet in war, in a time of crisis. for compression and inno- would have written 360 can; one of the pleasures of White Heat is that something different – it’s a more creative, I see Dickinson’s 1862 as a time of crisis, both vative syntax might gain poems or meditations of she links the newspapers and poems in surpris- associative project, where Schweitzer allows personal and national, and I think it is particu- her millions of followers on her own. But as she began ing and original ways. readers to immerse themselves in a world of larly relevant for us today, as we face our own twitter, she would likely be to develop the project, she Dickinson. There is a serendipitous quality to national and personal times of crisis.” a twitter skeptic. How about got more interested in how “All of us should be annotating digital White Heat. Schweitzer feels “the project is other digital platforms? to use the linking properties editions online,” Schweitzer says. Her own working because the responses are so layered.” If you explore the blog, you will find links to Ivy Schweitzer’s website, of the web in a way that longstanding commitment to digital humanities It offers a way to experience a “cumulative, letters, newspaper articles, images, even You- White Heat: Emily Dickin- would allow readers to was inspired in part by her husband Tom layered, immersive” synthesis of contexts and Tube clips. You might see a poem by a student son in 1862, A Weekly Blog, find good, solid scholarly Luxon’s Milton Reading Room. Before now, details. As Schweitzer explains, “I wanted to or by Schweitzer herself, or a reflective essay demonstrates that the more information that would make her most significant digital humanities work spend a year in the world of a creative mind, to by a colleague. White Heat features a lot of polyvalent nature of a blog is Dickinson’s poems more was the Occom Circle. The archival website move out of the critical, into the creative, and writing by Schweitzer, but she seems to play ideal for exploring Dickinson. dartmouth.edu/~occom/. She recently co- resonant. Schweitzer has noticed that there is was supported by an NEH grant in digitizing to invite readers to join me.” host as much as author – inviting many others produced a film based on one of her courses: a somewhat random quality to the materials and annotating the Mohegan leader’s writings into the world of Dickinson. Schweitzer is a I visited Ivy Schweitzer at her home, to talk It’s Criminal: A Tale of Incarceration and her students find on the web. She wanted to and many of the letters he received from Schweitzer is not building White Heat alone. generous host. Since Emily Dickinson herself about her website White Heat. She lives in the Ivy League, A Documentary Film and bring together some of the best scholarly other Native Americans in the late eighteenth She has a web designer and a tech wizard, and was so reluctant to receive visitors, it is hard an old Vermont farmhouse, painted a shade Transmedia Website, dir. Signe Taylor. http:// sources so that students and Dickinson fans century. In Schweitzer’s view, the annotations a couple of undergraduate research assistants. to imagine her hosting a blog. Nonetheless, of Dickinson Homestead yellow. A little itiscriminal.com/home.php. everywhere will be able to find them gathered make digital projects really interesting. One As she describes the students who are work- White Heat invites us into possibility in a way greenhouse tacked on to the side of the house together. Schweitzer says, “My site is on the of her purposes in creating White Heat is ing with her on the blog, I’m struck by her af- that is fundamentally Dickinsonian. near the front door adds another echo of the This year, Schweitzer is writing a weekly edge between scholarly and popular. I want Homestead. Inside, Schweitzer shows me Dickinson blog called White Heat. At year’s readers to be able to geek out about Dickinson, her desk, pointing out the Dickinson volumes end, Schweitzer hopes the project will become but have a scholarly foundation.” stacked around on the wide pine floorboards. an e-book available from the Dartmouth She is immersed in Dickinson this year. College library, but for now, readers have Schweitzer tells me that when she teaches, she the chance to tune in each week and read tries to push her students away from the ques- Parodies A Slimy Fellow at the Helm Truth Is as Sharp as Claws Schweitzer is a Professor of English at Schweitzer’s weekly entries, following along tions about what the poems mean, and toward

Dartmouth College, author of The Work of as her thoughts develop. questions about how they mean. “Even if you A slimy fellow at the helm Truth – is as sharp as claws – Self Representation and Perfecting Friendship offer multiple readings,” she says, “it closes By Felicia Nimue Ackerman Of this imperiled ship Impervious as death (2000), editor of anthologies on Colonial As the two of us drink tea from chunky down the reader’s ability to wrestle with the Is spreading chaos through the realm And lies are soft as kittens’ paws American Literature and the early section of handmade mugs, Schweitzer explains that poem.” The project of her blog is not so much He steers along its trip. And commonplace as breath – the Heath Anthology. On top of these scholarly the idea for the blog started with the Thomas to offer readings of the poems or creative Felicia Nimue Ackerman, frequent works, she has published quite a bit of poetry Johnson edition of the poems. She was responses to them (though both are there), contributor to the Bulletin, offers two He cares not for the ill or poor We perish on the day and fiction. In recent years, much of her work fascinated by the amazing idea that Dickinson but more to open Dickinson’s poems up for new parodies to the left. Any resem- Or kindness, truth, or art. Our breath is borne away, has moved off the page and into other media. may have written 360 poems in 1862; roughly readers, offering resources that allow readers blance to actual persons, readers will The president whom we endure For heaven’s but a lovely lie – She is the editor of Occom Circle: Digital a poem a day. At first, she thought she would to consider how the poems work – to notice of course realize, is purely coinciden- Has zero at the heart. How terrible to die! Scholarly Edition of Papers by and about try to blog the Johnson poems, writing a Dickinson’s “concision, depth, richness and tal. Samson Occom, Mohegan: https://www. response every day. She imagined that many resonances.” In some ways, this is a formalist

8 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 9 Dickinson Scholars Dickinson Scholars

Cindy Mackenzie, Series Editor understanding, Dickinson occupied a “piv- tendencies that divided the New England ations with “man, God, nature, and language otal point in the tension between Edwards’ mind met at cross-purposes,” two very dif- to carry on the business of circumference.” perception of types and Stevens’ elaboration ferent lines of development could proceed Fixed Points and Widening Diameters: of tropes,” in that she was capable of sus- from Dickinson: Eliot’s, where the center From here on, Gelpi’s whole career as a taining a balance between the concrete and holds both timeless moments and stretching scholar of American poetry followed the On Albert Gelpi the universal. wastes, and Frost’s, where man is alone in an design of the concentric circles that he iden- indifferent universe, and where only “per- tified as informing the structure of his Dick- In order to explore Dickinson’s mind, Gelpi fection of the work provides ‘a momentary inson book. Indeed, we have both “the fixed By Enikö Bollobás draws a map showing crisscrossing intel- stay against confusion.’” Gelpi identifies this points of reference” and “the widening diam- lectual currents and international poetic tra- double consciousness in Dickinson’s circum- eter” around them in Gelpi’s whole critical first heard Albert Gelpi’s name mentioned assumptions which I have taken for ditions which she was part of or which she ference, a concept that holds divisions and oeuvre, as he moved first to the American Iin Toni McNaron’s Dickinson seminar in granted in the past several decades of affected. In this map, Dickinson holds in- opposites such as pleasure and pain or love Romantic poetic scene, then to the Modern- the fall of 1978. I was a graduate student at my own professional life, in my own tellectual affinities with Emerson, Thoreau, and death, and establishes a fundamental ists, and finally to the poets after Modernism. the University of Minnesota, and although I seminars, essays, and books on Dick- and Whitman in terms of accepting the si- connection between Dickinson and Keats. was no novice to Dickinson’s poetry (having inson and other American poets. multaneity of “oneness and otherness”; with As the first step towards this larger picture, studied it meticulously as an English major at Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, Hardy, as well as In his landmark achievement, Gelpi put The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the Ameri- Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest), Dick- Indeed, Gelpi was one of the few Pascal and Melville in terms of her religious forward a thematic that dominated Dickin- can Poet (1975) was born, the first of his tril- inson criticism was a new territory for me. Dickinson scholars who erected the dilemma; with Hawthorne and Emerson in son criticism for the next several decades. ogy of American poetic history. Surveying Back in Budapest we read no theory (apart pillars of modern Dickinson criti- terms of her doubts concerning immortali- Among the themes introduced by Gelpi, now poets as “pioneers of the psyche” and from the reigning Marxism, which then had cism. His Emily Dickinson: The Mind ty, “the hardest Miracle”; with Shelley and one should mention the following: the role “mapmakers of the underworld,” Gelpi of- nothing to say about poetry) and very little of the Poet (1965) is over fifty years Stevens in terms of the design in the artist’s of the father in Dickinson’s intellectual fers readings, framed by psychological criti- criticism, our department library not being old, yet not a single sentence has lost mind and sense of order created by genius; growth and her assumed pose as a lost child, cism, of “the operations of the poet’s psyche equipped with recent books on “Western” its freshness or validity over the de- with Byron in terms of her “moments of without parents; her detachment from the – at once private and representative, person- critical thought. At that time of commu- cades. As he claims in the Preface, rebellion”; with Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, “world” and her attachment to those indi- al and collective – as it expressed itself in nist totalitarianism, books coming from the he brought together two approaches Parker, and Channing (all those who in her viduals (Wadsworth, Higginson, Lord) who the structure of language.” He explores the West were generally considered a threat to reigning at the time: biographical and view saw “New Englandly”) in terms of her “kindled the spark”; the motivation for her manifestations of the poetic psyche over a the Orwellian “reality control” practiced by textual criticism, and put them in the “double awareness of things”; with Thoreau withdrawal from the world (whether she period of some 200 years, presenting a very the ruling communists of this geographi- service of mapping up “the design of and Keats in terms of viewing herself “as a found the world too insubstantial or too sub- clear canon of five poets: Taylor, Emerson, cally and intellectually landlocked country. the poet’s mind” (where the assump- craftsman making order out of the fragments stantial); the experience at Mount Holyoke Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson. This applied even more to Western literature tion that a woman poet had a “mind,” of mutability”; and with Gabriel Rossetti, Female Seminary, where she suffered the criticism, considered especially dangerous and was moreover worthy of scholar- Oscar Wilde, and Lionel Johnson in terms of dilemma of “how to live when one could One helpful paradigm Gelpi introduces to for disturbing official Marxist dogmas. But ly attention, was no less revolution- her masks. not accept Christ’s call”; the choice between describe the poets is the distinction between luckily for me, I could spend a graduate year ary). At the time when Dickinson’s “a calling of faith” and a “commitment types and tropes, or between metaphor as in Minneapolis, where I was busy making intriguing personal eccentricities Gelpi devotes the book’s central and prob- to the world”; her double vision or double figure of speech and metaphor as symbol, up for the loss I had suffered from politics were so central to Dickinson scholar- ably longest chapter to Dickinson’s “seeing consciousness, the capacity of the mind to between imagination (or fancy) and back home, and read as much so-called “sec- ship, biography could not be ignored. New Englandly”: the “doctrines” of Tran- hold opposites; circumference as a particular Imagination.” This distinction, he claims, ondary” material, criticism and theory, as I But for Gelpi, biography was “applied biog- decades of the 21st century, but in 1965, scendentalism as they appear in the poems Dickinsonian experience of consciousness defines the “underlying dialectic of the could. Toni’s weekly seminars were heavily raphy,” so to speak, of the same rank with when Matthiessen’s 1941 American Renais- and letters, tracing them beyond the Atlantic (at times double, at times expansive); her American tradition,” placing Poe (and the criticism-based: she seamlessly incorporated the exploration of cultural currents, serving sance canon, conspicuously ignoring Dick- coast, to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, gendered masks from virgin to raped virgin line to Stevens) on the tropological side the newest findings of Dickinson scholarship the higher purpose of understanding a poet’s inson, was taken for granted, Dickinson was and beyond the 19th century, to Eliot and to lover and wife; her “Bachelorhood”; her and Taylor, Edwards, Thoreau, Emerson, in her discussions, gave interpretations that imagination, consciousness, sensibility, or still considered a figure of personal and poet- Frost. Yet Gelpi claims that Dickinson was qualities as an Apollonian (vs. Dionysian) and Whitman on the typological side, always applied critical claims, and had us simply mind. ic oddity, or at best a minor point, as in Roy different from all in having a “determined poet; her self-empowering sense of creativ- with Dickinson in between,” once again read some basic critical pieces. And promi- Harvey Pearce’s The Continuity of American rigor of sight and mind” and a “flinty hones- ity (volcano, bee, spider); her distinctive occupying a central place (Emily Dickinson). nent among the critics who came to be part Most importantly, Gelpi placed Dickinson in Poetry (1961). ty” that the others lacked and that made for style and fashioning of a uniquely subver- of our discussions was Albert Gelpi. the center of the canon, naming her a “central a complexity of mind rooted not in harmony sive language; her poetic masks, among In response to the often repeated question and radial” figure in the “sweep of the Amer- Gelpi discusses Dickinson not just as a poet but dissonance. This is why, Gelpi insists, them that of the child, the virgin-bride, the of Dickinson criticism of who the male Rereading Gelpi’s works now, not only do I ican imagination from Jonathan Edwards but as a thinker, and a radical thinker at that, the range and variety of Dickinson’s “emo- bride, the flower, the sun, the noon, and the lover(s) might have been in Dickinson’s life recall how often McNaron used Gelpi’s in- to Robert Lowell, from Anne Bradstreet to also assigning the poet a “unique and cru- tional experience” will “far surpass that of master; her “drift to egocentricity” (linking and poems, Gelpi makes a radical claim: not sights to frame her own observations but also Marianne Moore.” It is hard to comprehend cial position in the history of the American Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, or Whitman.” her to Crane, Williams, Lowell, Berryman, a real person nor even God, but rather “an how often Gelpi is the actual source of the the radicalism of this gesture from the first mind and imagination.” In Gelpi’s original And because in her mind “the opposing and Ginsberg); and finally, her grand negoti- essential component of her personality,” the

10 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 11 Dickinson Scholars Teaching Dickinson

Marianne Noble, Series Editor Jungian animus, or “masculine elements Immanence,” Boundary II, 1983]). As Gelpi to confirm the word’s communicable refer- in the female psyche” (Tenth Muse). (This puts it, “the dialectic between Romanticism entiality to reality and truth, even a transcen- argument is further developed and put to and Modernism resides in related dialectics dental truth, extrinsic to language.” Gelpi use in a memorable essay published in 1977 within each which establish continuities be- sees this Neoromantic sensibility in a whole Finding a Context for Teaching Dickinson for the first time, “Emily Dickinson and the tween them more abiding and constitutive range of poets grouped together in a “roomy Deerslayer: The Dilemma of the Woman Poet than the overt discontinuities.” Dickinson rubric,” among them, Roethke, Berryman, in America,” in which he reads “My Life had figures prominently in the chapter on H. D., Ginsberg, Snyder, Olson, Duncan, Levertov, By Páraic Finnerty stood – A Loaded Gun” as the drama of the as the largely invisible yet still operative Rich, and Baraka. animus in the historical context of frontier model for women poets. America.) To balance the attention given Several other works could be mentioned as ot a single student chose to write about was so special, so different from all the other poems and topics, we didn’t quite get past to the masculine element, Gelpi discusses The third volume completing the critical tril- representative of Gelpi’s outer circles: the NDickinson, after all of my passion and US writers we had covered. Looking back the initial question. As a result, we never circumference as a manifestation of Erikson’s ogy on the American poetic tradition, Amer- monographs on Wallace Stevens (Wallace learning and careful lesson planning. Why? on this first Dickinson class, I think I went got to deliberate on Dickinson as poet who feminine “inner space” in the psyche, whose ican Poetry after Modernism: The Power of Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, 1990) I felt I had let Dickinson down. I’d do better too far and something and someone (prob- critiqued gender roles in her poems “I'm “frontierswoman” Dickinson again was. Here the Word (2015), presents sixteen American and C. Day Lewis (Living in Time: The next time, I vowed. That was in 2001. How- ably Dickinson) was hurt in the process. In ‘wife’ – I've finished that – ” (Fr225), “She too, Gelpi is at his best in drawing the grand poets and through them a tradition whose Poetry of C. Day Lewis, 1998); the critical ever, finding the way to inspire a love of preparation for the Dickinson class I asked rose to His Requirement – dropt ” (Fr857), picture: placing Dickinson at the head of both distinctive feature is that it is no tradition edition of Adrienne Rich’s works (Adrienne Dickinson in my students would not come students to re-read Emerson’s “The Poet” “Title divine – is mine!” (Fr194). Nor did the tradition of women poets in whose poetry in the European sense. For “the American Rich's Poetry and Prose [with Barbara to me as easily I had imagined. This essay (1844) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philoso- we get to evaluate Dickinson as an author the animus-relationship is crucial and of the poet could assume no given role, no accept- Charlesworth Gelpi], 1993); the edited is the record of disappointments and a final phy of Composition” (1846) and to consider who succinctly dealt with complex exis- tradition based on a feminine epistemology ed function, and so had to draw from within volumes (The Poet in America, 1650 to the feeling of having gotten it right. how Dickinson’s vision of poetry and the tential and philosophical issues in “Safe in relying on specifically feminine forms of himself or herself the sources, terms, and Present, 1973; Denise Levertov: Selected role of the poet differed from theirs. I as- their alabaster chambers” (Fr124), “I felt a spiritual experience. ends of literary practice.” Criticism, 1993; The Blood of the Poet: In October 2001, I first had an oppor- Funeral, in my Brain” (Fr340) “I heard a Selected Poems of William Everson, 1994; tunity to teach American literature. Al- Fly buzz – when I died – ” (Fr591), and In A Coherent Splendor: The American Postmodernism’s relationship to Modern- The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise though I was very excited about teach- “Because I could not stop for Death – ” Poetic Renaissance 1910-1950 (1987) ism is as ambivalent as Modernism’s rela- Levertov, co-edited with Robert Bertholf [and ing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel (Fr479). The subject of female sexuality Gelpi moves further out on his widening tionship to Romanticism was. As Gelpi puts awarded by the MLA as the best scholarly Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Har- in “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun intellectual diameters, now exploring what it, “The Postmodernist break with Modern- edition of a literary correspondence], 2004); riet Jacobs, Herman Melville, Harriet – ” (Fr764), “I started Early – Took my he rightly terms “the American Poetic Re- ism serves to define the poetry of the Cold the collection of critical essays co-edited Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Dog – ” (Fr656), and “In Winter in my naissance”: American Modernist poetry as War decades, but just as Modernism defined with Robert Bertholf (Robert Duncan and Henry James on a twelve-week unit on Room” (Fr1742) remained undiscussed. the continuation of Romantic poetry. The itself not just against but, in many ways, in Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics, the nineteenth-century American literature, reader can again enjoy Gelpi’s two visible dialogue with Romanticism, so Postmod- Politics of Poetry, 2006); and the seminal the real bliss would surely come near The problem I did not anticipate or strengths as a scholar of American poetry: ernism defined itself not just in opposition essay on the connections between American the end of the unit, with the prospect of prepare for was that the students found his monographic scrutiny of eleven individ- to but in dialogue with Modernism, as the literature and American painting, “White a two-hour seminar on Emily Dickin- Dickinson’s poems difficult and most of ual poets (Frost and Ransom, Stevens, El- transition played itself out over two gener- Light in the Wilderness: Landscape & Self son. As this was my first time teaching the class was taken up with interpreting iot, Pound, H. D., Williams, Tate and Crane, ations of poets.” (Gelpi describes in poetry in Nature’s Nation” (in American Light: The American literature, I was only ever one her poems, sometimes word by word. Winters and Jeffers) and his drawing of the what Linda Hutcheon observed in prose in Luminist Movement, 1850-1875, 1980). or two classes ahead of the students in No student chose to write an essay on larger picture, the complex context of tradi- her own A Poetics of Postmodernism: how terms of my preparation and reading. I Dickinson that year, nor, I confess again, tion. His governing thesis consists in the fol- “postmodernism is both oedipally opposi- There is one thing about concentric circles: was relieved to be getting to the class on in 2002 and 2003. It is clear to me that lowing: bracketed by two world wars, poet- tional and filially faithful to modernism.”) much like circumference, they have a center. Dickinson. Not only would preparation I didn’t quite find the best way of bal- ic Modernism is Janus-faced, comprised of And as “Postmodernism took shape as a po- And for Gelpi this center has been, for over be minimal for it, my PhD dissertation had signed students some of her poems and some ancing students’ needs with my own passion Symbolism and Imagism (or, what Marjorie etics of indeterminacy,” the decisive break fifty years, the “fixed point of reference” been on Dickinson and Shakespeare, but I rather leading questions. The first question and prejudices. The experience also made Perloff called the Symbolist-Dualist tradi- with Modernism came, Gelpi argues, in the called Emily Dickinson. would be at last able to share my love of asked them to assess Dickinson as a writer me realize that in response to the multiple tion and the “Other” tradition of Indetermi- 1970s and 80s when “poets looked back […] Dickinson’s poetry. who refused to play the role of the publish- ways in which Dickinson’s poems can be in- nacy [The Poetics of Indeterminacy, 1981]), to the mid-century Objectivist poets George Enikö Bollobás is Professor of Literature ing, public poet by discussing “This was a terpreted, students often retreat into the safe- should be explained by the Janus-face of Oppen and Louis Zukofsky”; these are the at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, It did not go as planned. I have to confess I Poet – It is That” (Fr446), “Publication – is ty of matters of biography rather than tackle Romanticism itself, the tradition it evolved Language poets “reformulating Modernism Hungary. She has written several books on overwhelmed my poor students. The prob- the Auction” (Fr788), “I cannot dance opon the challenge of her poetry. from (which traditions were most illumina- into Poststructuralist deconstruction.” But American literature, among them mono- lem was that my attitude and conception of my Toes – ” (Fr381), and “I would not paint tively articulated by Charles Altieri as the alongside the Postmoderns, Gelpi identifies graphs on Emily Dickinson and Charles Ol- Dickinson at that time was shaped by my – a picture – ” (Fr348). In 2005, I took a different approach. My dialectics of transcendence and immanence, another line of descent that, for its persisting son, and award-winning histories of Amer- belief that Dickinson stood out among her thinking about Dickinson had changed over going back to Wordsworth and Coleridge, “Romantic inclinations,” he calls Neoro- ican literature (in Hungarian). A review of US contemporaries in every respect. I want- Although the worksheet for the class indi- the succeeding years and was now greatly respectively [“From Symbolist Thought to mantic, characterized by a “persistent effort her book on Dickinson appears on page 29. ed to hammer home exactly why Dickinson cated that the plan was to focus on other shaped by research on her representations of

12 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 13 Teaching Dickinson

gender and sexuality, especially queer read- son’s and Whitman’s Civil War poetry. In of her countrymen and women, empathiz- ings of her work. That year I had published class we read the Dickinson poems included ing with and articulating their experiences Emily Dickinson’s Prescient Stages of Grief an essay on Dickinson and Oscar Wilde in Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller’s ex- at a time of national suffering and anguish. By Daphne Thompson and was also working on a queer reading cellent Words for the Hour: A New Anthol- In singing off charnel steps she was not ex- of Dickinson and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ogy of American Civil War Poetry (2006) pressing her own sorrow but creating timely n “The last Night that She lived” (Fr1100), the one who is facing death as well as in the that, although there is no doubt Dickinson was which was published in 2008. Rather than alongside selections from Whitman’s Drum “supposed persons” as part of her war effort. IDickinson strives to assist the grieving in onlookers. An emphasis on this emotional obsessed with death, she also realized the po- attempting to cover so many aspects of Taps (1865) and over the years this session traversing through their emotions after the grieving process that death engenders in the tential of utilizing poetry – versus or in addi- Dickinson’s writings in one class, I decided has become one of the best-attended and Over the last few years, not only have stu- death of a loved one in a prescient description surviving mourners is Dickinson’s intent in tion to traditional religion – as a literary means to pair Dickinson with Whitman and discuss most popular classes I teach. I usually be- dents engaged enthusiastically with this ma- that closely mirrors the process Dr. Elisabeth her poem. In this poem, she ironically erad- to bolster the emotional and spiritual needs of both poets in the context of nineteenth-cen- gin with Dickinson’s words to her Norcross terial, but the assignment question on poet- Kübler-Ross formalized a century later in icates the traditionally comforting last word those left behind in the world of the living. tury US discourses of gender and sexuality. cousins, dated by Johnson 1864: “Sorrow ry has become the one that they frequently what has become known as the five stages of convention while subconsciously and pre- I had students examine examples of Dickin- seems more general than it did, and not choose. Clearly, the sympathetic, socially grief. Both women similarly recognized that sciently outlining an orderly and possibly ar- Dickinson focuses on the emotional response son’s erotic poetry in relation to Whitman’s the estate of a few persons, since the war engaged Dickinson I was teaching them such an internal process needed to be em- chetypal grieving process. that death plants in surviving mourners even depictions of male and female desire. For began; and if the anguish of others helped about appealed to them more than the ex- braced during times when reliance on proper more than on the dying. The poem is composed instance, students read Dickinson’s “Wild one with one’s own, now would be many ceptional, subversive poet who first attract- public behavior and performative Christianity Although as Nancy Mayer writes in “A Poet's of seven quatrains, and the collective speakers nights – Wild nights!” (Fr269) and “The medicines. ’Tis dangerous to value, for only ed me. In January 2018, I was proud of the was waning. Although Dickinson’s poem em- Business: Love and Mourning in the Deathbed seem to be struggling through the stages of Malay – took the Pearl – ” (Fr451), and the precious can alarm. I noticed that Robert fact that almost a third of students wrote on phasizes the customary socialized and ritual- Poems of Emily Dickinson” (EDJ 6.1, 1997), grief while watching someone on her death- then considered these poems alongside the Browning had made another poem, and was Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetic respons- ized process of death, the stages she insight- Dickinson’s poems in general “often refute or bed. The use of the understatement “It was a twenty-ninth bather section from Whitman's astonished – till I remembered that I, myself, es to the Civil War, but also of their sensitive fully describes reflect the budding emergence undermine the comforts of the religious certi- Common Night / Except the Dying” shows the “Song of Myself,” in which a respectable in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps” and thoughtful analysis of this key moment of internalized grieving rituals through which tude that many” of her literary contemporaries speakers could be in the midst of grief’s stage woman spies on nude male bathers and vi- (L298). Noting the sheer number of poems in US history. many humans progress to defeat feelings of contributed to the public, “The last Night that one, denial. They mention that they “noticed cariously joins them in their activity of male Dickinson wrote during the Civil War period despair after loved ones die. She lived” makes known “a love for human smallest things – / Things overlooked before” bonding. A bit controversial perhaps, but I (1861-65), I passionately present Dickinson The joy of teaching Dickinson over the beings and human life that is both particular with the assistance of the “great light upon wanted to challenge the notion of Dickinson not as an isolated, macabre poet, obsessed years has always been times when students Thomas H. Johnson explains facts related to and universal and occasionally communal” [their] Minds,” seeing physical objects with as a figure associated with personal confine- with death, but one who uses imagery of challenge my beliefs about this poet and her “The last Night that She lived”: “On May third through the use of plural speakers. Mayer more clarity possibly because they could not ment and restraint, and to present instead a violence, suffering, and death to reflect and poems, and ask me to consider her in alter- of [1866], Laura Dickey, the young wife of additionally points out that by utilizing col- accept the emotional reality that their loved poet who was daring to expand alternative express a period when “Sorrow seems more native and refreshing ways. It is a revelation Frank W. Dickey of Michigan, and a daughter lective “We,” Dickinson indicates that “while one was on the verge of death. Mayer points possibilities in the exemplification of erotic general” and to offer poetic “medicines.” to me, however, that the best way for me of L. M. Hills of Amherst, died at her parents’ death is solitary, dying is accomplished within out that when “poetry focuses on interior real- experience and sexual identity and desire. to teach Dickinson has been to move away home. The Hills were lifelong neighbors of the human community – informed by deaths ity, time itself stretches or collapses according Although primarily alluding to news that from my own particular research interests the Dickinsons, and their property adjoined that have happened within one’s own life and to subjective emotional importance,” making While students were very interested in this Robert Browning had written his first new and ideas, and to engage with ground-break- the Dickinsons’ to the east” (Emily Dickinson: by witnesses, like Dickinson herself, willing “Nature different.” Another reason Dickinson topic, very few chose to write essays on poems since the death of his wife, Elizabeth ing research on Dickinson’s complex and An Interpretive Biography, 1963). Dickey’s to push imagination to its furthest reaches in identifies the “great light” could be to illus- either Dickinson or Whitman. While I am Barrett Browning, on June 29, 1861, Dick- nuanced reaction to the Civil War. I need- death may have led Dickinson to compose a order to be our guide.” This poem illustrates trate the speakers’ near blinding, similar to the proud of these classes for the ways in which inson’s reference to Browning, I explain, ed to approach teaching Dickinson, as I ap- poem that accentuates the emotions of collec- we tackled such important issues for under- is very provocative and significant in this proached teaching other writers, by seeing tive first person plural mourners as well as the standing Whitman’s and Dickinson’s work, context. I remind students that Dickinson her anew through the perspectives, theories, mysteries of the afterlife. Dickinson’s poem I remained disappointed that the teaching greatly admired and was highly influenced and insights of others. illustrates a process that correlates with the and learning environment I created did by Browning, particularly owing to his de- five stages of grief Kübler-Ross formalized in not facilitate the type of student response I velopment and popularization of the dra- 1969 that many humans follow after a loved sought. Student preferred to write on The matic lyric, a first-person poem written from Páraic Finnerty, a member of the EDIS one dies, to give the grieving structure in a Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and even the perspective of someone else. I inform Board and the Chair of the Nominations time of disorder: denial, anger, bargaining, de- The Bostonians rather than interpret two of students that a few years earlier, in 1862, Committee, began teaching at the Univer- pression, and acceptance (which are not nec- the US’s greatest poets. But why? Dickinson told her friend and mentor Thom- sity of Kent, where he did his PhD, and has essarily linear, progressive, or all-inclusive). as Wentworth Higginson, “When I state my- been at the University of Portsmouth since Dr. Allan Kellehear indicates in the forward to Recognizing the importance of recent schol- self, as the Representative of the Verse – it 2004, where he teaches US Literature, Kübler-Ross’ 40th anniversary edition of On arship on Dickinson and the American Civil does not mean – me – but a supposed per- Women’s Writing in the Americas, and US Death and Dying that the value of these stag- War, and having become very interested in son” (L268). As a class we examine some of Masculinities. He is the author of Emily es is that friends and/or family confer about the idea of Dickinson not as a unique writer the poems Dickinson wrote during the Civil Dickinson’s Shakespeare (2006) and Emily Two 19th-century deathbed lithographs. Left, the death of Little Eva, 1852, by Louisa Corbaux (from The “their reactions to impending death,” which Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gates and Robbins eds., 2007). Eva is in the light; the mourners cover their but one fully engaged with multiple aspects War period as dramatic lyrics in which she Dickinson and Her British Contemporaries encourages “basic understanding and insight faces. Right, Edvard Munch, The Deathbed, 1896 (from Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life, Mara-Helen of her culture, I decided to teach Dickin- got inside the mental and emotional lives (2014). into the social and emotional experience of” Wood, ed, 1992). The dying woman is hidden, and responses range from anger, to grief, to acceptance.

14 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 15 experience of looking directly into the sun, thing she may have been about to share. Dick- another possible reference to the mourners’ inson offers a faint hint of comfort or hope for The last Night that She lived Thomas Dwight Gilbert’s Useful Career disbelief over the dying person’s approaching eternal life in that the dying woman gives her It was a Common Night final moments. Here Dickinson portrays the “consent” to die, intimating that she could be Except the Dying – this to Us By Jo Ann Orr and Dan Manheim first stage of grief, denial. confident where she will spend eternity and Made Nature different therefore does not protest. If the speakers em- do feel so lonely, at times dear brother, Already at 39, Dwight was prosperous also served as president of the Union Benev- In the second stage of grieving, the speakers brace this belief as well, then this fourth stage We noticed smallest things – I I [feel] so keenly the loss of a Mothers enough to travel for two years, at home and olent Association hospital, and helped estab- experience anger. They wonder why “Others of grief, depression, will be easier for them to Things overlooked before love, and influence, and that sympathy our abroad, before settling into his new work. lish other charitable associations in the city. could exist / While She must finish,” while ad- traverse. By this great light upon our Minds Mother alone could give – Is it strange, that When he returned, he quickly became one mitting that “quite / a Jealousy for Her arose.” Italicized – as ‘twere. I look to you, dear brother, when I feel thus, of Grand Rapids’ founding citizens, presid- Not long after Dwight Gilbert had moved As Mayer points out, “the poem is not, of Last, the poem’s mourners do, as traditions that I should look to you, and find myself ing over the establishment of the institutions to Grand Rapids, his future brother-in-law course, protesting the survival of other peo- dictate, “regulate” their belief, reflecting As We went out and in thinking of, and loving you as a Father . . . that ground a fledgling city: he became pres- consulted with him about the possibility ple’s children; it is enacting the kind of ‘jealou- Kübler-Ross’ final grieving stage of accep- Between Her final Room Now Frank is going to be married, Mattie ident of Grand Rapids Gas and of the City of establishing himself in the west, before sy’ that arises from loving any one, particular tance. Physically, the only item left to order or And Rooms where Those to be alive and I will feel more than ever, that you are National Bank, and he had a financial inter- Edward Dickinson settled matters by com- child” who faces certain death. Randall Huff organize is the stiffening body of their friend Tomorrow were, a Blame the last one left . . . ” est in various enterprises that, at the time of mitting to build Austin and Sue a house on (Bloom’s Literature) notes that the mourners or family member, so they follow society’s his death in 1894, had “made Grand Rapids Main Street. Alfred Habegger suggests that “went between the final room and other rooms conventions and mechanically straighten her That Others could exist Susan Gilbert Dickinson, who wrote that let- what it is.” Dwight may have sent Austin some house that contained ‘Those to be alive / Tomorrow,’ head and hair. Spiritually, the only thing left to While She must finish quite ter to her eldest brother in September 1850, plans of a sort currently popular in burgeon- [while] irrationally blaming them for continu- order in the “awful leisure” after death is their A Jealousy for Her arose lost both her parents when she was young Though he never went to Congress, Dwight ing western towns like Grand Rapids, adding ing to exist” in the face of their loved one’s faith and belief. If survivors can come to terms So nearly infinite – and passed from one family member to an- Gilbert took numerous political positions. that the Evergreens may have been “based imminent death. This description reflects the with believing in the afterlife, then this clos- other until she ran off to be a schoolteacher Having earlier served his turn as Sheriff of on the Michigan design.” The houses the mourners’ passage through the stage of anger. ing stage of grief, acceptance, will ease their We waited while She passed – in Baltimore at just 20, “relieving Mr Cutler Ottawa County, back in the ‘40s, he entered brothers-in-law built at the same time, in the feelings of loss. However, during this time of It was a narrow time – [her brother-in-law and guardian] for one the state legislature in 1861, chairing the 1850s, are strikingly similar. Dickinson does not overtly display the next “awful leisure,” Dickinson shows the disqui- Too jostled were Our Souls to speak year.” It is not surprising that she would have Ways and Means Committee and the Banks step of Kübler-Ross’ model, bargaining, which et some survivors feel, which is compounded At length the notice came. sought in her eldest brother the love, support, and Corporations Committee. Returning, he Dwight built a larger house not long after usually involves the grieving person’s attempt if they (like Dickinson) internally question and stability she had needed her whole life. served for many years on the Board of Ed- he married in his mid-50s. Mary Angelina to make a deal with God. For example, the whether death is not, as traditionally consid- She mentioned, and forgot – ucation, expanding its public school system Bingham Gilbert is worthy of her own pro- griever may say, “If you save this life, I prom- ered, a result of God’s (possibly vengeful) Then lightly as a Reed Whether Thomas Dwight Gilbert welcomed during a period of its growth from “a small file. Born in Sault Ste. Marie, the daughter ise never to take anything for granted again.” will or if they ponder whether the afterlife is Bent to the Water, struggled scarce – the role of father to his younger sisters is village without railroads or even good wag- of a missionary to the Ojibwa, she wrote However, here negotiating may be inferred, even real. Dickinson’s literary representation Consented, and was dead – unknown. Sue’s “poetical bachelor brother” on roads, all supplies being brought up the about “the Soo” in later life, and in the words because who knows what disjointed thoughts of this anxiety could encourage her readers was ambitious. After graduating from Deer- river” to a city of 20,000. He spent five years of a 1911 memorial published in Michigan flit across the speakers’ “jostled souls” and to acknowledge the conflict between modern And We – We placed the Hair – field Academy, he left his home in Greenfield as president of the Board of Public Works, Tradesman, the Ojibwa of the Soo “wept as minds as they go through the “narrow time”? doubt and past religious certainty. And drew the Head erect – to seek his fortune in Grand Haven, Mich- guiding the establishment of the city’s water they met and talked with her . . . when they Could they be bargaining silently with God And then an awful leisure was igan, a settlement with, at that time, “about department; and he served as an alderman visited [Grand Rapids] . . . , and no one could to spare their loved one? Mayer points out Even though Emily Dickinson herself had no Belief to regulate – half a dozen settlers.”1 His brother Francis, for his district. stand by and hear them talk unmoved.” “the lack of incident” while the speakers are sense of closure on the issue of immortality, the soon-to-be married Frank of Sue’s letter, waiting on death. Perhaps the lack of explicit she paradoxically does provide posterity with accompanied him, and they built a series of Like his sister’s father-in-law, he took an in- As president of the Kent County Soldiers incident is due to the implicit bargaining the a sense of closure in the form of presciently business enterprises, beginning with a saw- terest in expanding educational opportunities Monument Association, Dwight Gilbert di- mourners attempt to accomplish in their an- describing Kübler-Ross’ later-formalized grief almost a century apart lend credence to mill that failed in the Panic of 1837, then in the growing region. From 1864 to 1875 he rected the commissioning and dedication, guish. stages of grief through which many humans the notion that Dickinson’s poem reflects an shifting to warehousing. was an elected member of the Board of Re- in 1885, of the first monument in the United must travel. Could the dual mindset of Dick- archetypal deep-seated human desire to em- gents of the State University in Ann Arbor, States to pay tribute to the efforts of women In depression – the next to last grieving stage inson and Kübler-Ross a century apart be be- ploy order even when challenging the order of The brothers’ fortunes prospered. By 1850 chairing the Finance Committee, attending during the Civil War. He is buried in the Ful- – emptiness seems to surround the mourn- cause the specific process of grieving that both the status quo. they had expanded into lumber and shipping to the budgets of that larger institution just as ton Street Cemetery, for which he donated ers as the dying woman “Bent to the Water, describe is an inborn archetype, a component – in a big way. A few years later, they moved Edward and Austin Dickinson did those of the land, and his portrait bust stands in Veter- struggled scarce – / Consented, and was dead of the collective unconscious? Is it pure coin- Daphne Thompson has taught mostly com- to Grand Rapids. Dwight, the elder and dear- Amherst College. ans Memorial Park. – ” without a final triumphant proclamation cidence that Dickinson presciently traced al- position and advanced composition courses est to Sue, used to say that during those years of having seen a glowing light or God at the most the exact stages Kübler-Ross formalized in North and South Carolina for 25 years, he got to know the turns and headlands of the Dwight Gilbert’s obituary refers to him as 1Obituary in The Evening Leader, 19 Nov. 1894. end of a tunnel to welcome the newly dying or so much later? This similarity could be related during which she also spent a decade as a stretch of the river between the two towns so “an intensely practical, zealous Christian.” Unless otherwise indicated, historical citations are any last words to comfort the survivors since to one of Carl Jung’s archetypal dreams about writing center director. She is working on well that he could tell stories about each one As one of the city’s leading public figures, he from this source; quotations from letters, from Jay the dying one “mentioned, and forgot – ” any- death. The twin descriptions of the stages of her first novel. during boat trips. not only held various political offices, but he Leyda’s The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson.

16 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 17 This page: the portrait bust of Thomas Dwight Gilbert in Veterans Memorial Park, in Grand Rapids. Facing page, top row, the Kent County Civil War Monument and Dwight Gilbert’s memorial stone in Fulton Street Cemetery; middle row, the Gilbert Brothers’ first house, completed in 1858, and on the right, the Evergreens, the house Austin Dickinson had built on his father’s property, after consulting with Dwight Gilbert about the plans; bottom row, a 1915 postcard of The Gilbert Building, which once stood in the heart of the city, and the Eastlake style house that Dwight Gilbert built in the late 1870s. Photo Credit for b/w images: Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Archives, Grand Rapids Public Library, Grand Rapids, Mi.

18 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 19 one who had experienced fulfillment: as “sumptuous” might seem altogether out Wilbur had written of his own verse A Tribute to Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) a devoted husband and loving father; as a of place in a poem about “destitution” that it was meant to say (as two of his distinguished poet – he had already won were it not for the fact that, as Wilbur ar- biographers put it) that “squalor, fail- a Pulitzer as well as the National Book gues, Dickinson creates her own vocabu- ure, pain, and misery occur . . . within By Judith Farr Award – and finally, as a famous and suc- lary in which the absence of satisfaction a cosmic order” (Robert Bagg and Mary cessful man. But he was far from being is alluring and to lack all is to possess Bagg, Let Us Watch, Richard Wilbur, A smug about his “luck,” as he called it. everything. Critical Study, 2017), a realization that he death in October 2017 of Richard I had the good fortune to meet Richard and the Metaphysical Poets”), the depart- Since I was attempting to write poetry, he should not be troubling. But in “Sump- TWilbur – Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Wilbur in 1961. Having just left the Yale ment chairman invited me to accompany joked, in fact, about how many times his When Wilbur wrote “Sumptuous Destitu- tuous Destitution,” he appears to echo translator, critic and teacher – must grieve graduate school, I was a novice instructor him during his visit to the college. own verse had been rejected by The New tion,” Thomas H. Johnson had published Whicher, when he regards Dickinson’s all who admire the luminous clarity of his in English at Vassar College. Mr. Wilbur Yorker. His current good fortune, howev- his editions of Dickinson’s Poems (1955) poetry by contrast as “an effort to cope verse and the probity and grace of his in- was invited to visit the college to read Wilbur’s kindness to my very young self, er, made him all the more respectful of and Letters (1960), while George Frisbie with deprivation.” And he explains his tellect. Scholars of Emily Dickinson’s po- and comment on his poems, especially his quiet modesty about his own extraor- Dickinson’s ability to cope with what he Whicher, of Wilbur’s alma mater Amherst diagnosis, “For her there were three ma- etry have sustained a special loss. For few those from Things of This World (1956) dinary achievements, and his vision of deemed her “disappointment” and to lift College, had long since brought out his in- jor deprivations: she was deprived of an poets, especially among those called “for- and The Beautiful Changes (1947). Re- Emily Dickinson as a person as well as from it a beauty and sanctity orthodox and steady religious malist,” could claim to admire her unique alizing that he greatly esteemed Emily a poet remain extraordinarily vivid to me that he found blessed. faith; she was deprived of love; genius more than he did, while few who Dickinson’s verse and because American today. I remember that as we spoke, I be- she was deprived of literary are familiar with the lineaments of Dick- Literature had just published an essay came conscious that he was celebrating Years later, in 1994 or so, I recognition” (54). Interesting- inson’s life could approach it with such of mine about Dickinson’s interest in what Dickinson achieved despite what he wrote to Richard Wilbur, ask- ly, although he had access to sympathy and – one is tempted to say – the metaphysical poets (Judith Banzer, considered the “limitations” of her life ing if I might include his es- the essentially correct Dickin- tenderness as Wilbur. “‘Compound Manner’: Emily Dickinson and that his own perspective was that of say “’Sumptuous Destitution,” son texts and was not depen- from a book entitled Emily dent on the legend of passion Dickinson: Three Views (Am- and renunciation, eccentricity, herst College Press, 1960), in and near-derangement fostered the collection of critical essays by the Bianchi texts of her The Dickinson Sweeting is Born I was editing for Prentice Hall aunt’s life and work, Wilbur (Emily Dickinson, A Collection could not have read their an- n apple tree at the Dickinson Homestead bore fruit for of Critical Essays, 1996). Hum- tidote: Richard Sewall’s mag- Athe first time in many years, under the attentive min- bly I explained that my emolu- isterial biography The Life of istrations of horticulturalist and Museum volunteer Francis ment for gathering, introduc- Emily Dickinson (Yale 1974). Martin. Apples do not come true from seed – that is, the ing, and paying authors of the seed from last week’s golden delicious that you’ve loving- chosen essays was so modest Nevertheless, to some extent, ly tended and sprouted will not produce a golden delicious that I expected he might earn he anticipated Sewall’s deci- tree, but at best a remote facsimile. As Michael Pollan has very little and I, myself, noth- sion that the “stress should [al- put it, “if not for grafting . . . every apple in the world would ing but the honor of his assent. ways] be on her achievement be its own distinct variety.” He calls this “genetic variabil- By return mail, I received his as a poet,” not on Emily Dick- ity” of the apple a kind of “ineluctable wildness” (The Bot- cheerful “Of course!,” together inson’s possible “disenchant- Photo Credit: Vincent Tolentino any of Desire, 2001). The new produce of the Homestead with the generous words “Take ment” with a “society” and orchard will be something entirely new and original. it for nothing.” fluential biography of Dickinson,This Was “way of life in which she could not be a Poet (1938). When I first read Wilbur’s happy and productive” (156). Sewall’s It is fitting that the “wild prosperity” (Fr1616) of the apple “Sumptuous Destitution” was written in essay, together with his other observa- great mission as a biographer and as a should spring out from among the hidden, withdrawn pre- 1960. Its title comes from the Dickinson tions about her life and art, I realized that popular teacher of Dickinson’s verse at cincts of those venerable woods. Since Martin has identi- poem that R.W. Franklin lists as #1404, to some degree he agreed with Whicher, Yale was to insist that Dickinson was fied it as a descendent of an heirloom variety, the Tolman which explores the experience of find- who found Emily Dickinson’s poetry the no twisted neurotic with little human Sweet, introduced in 1822, the new apple, however far These wild apples from Kazakhstan show how vari- ing “Joy” in “many and reportless plac- product of a mind and heart that were fa- sympathy, but a woman whom tragedy from that early tree its genetic fall turns out to be, has been able the apple’s form may be. Photographed by Beck es.” It is a joy that is sincere enough but miliar with discontent, even desperation. might touch but could never rob of what named the Dickinson Sweeting (after exceptionally close Low, permaculture practitioner and writer. leaves a “nameless” if “sumptuous” and Indeed, in chapters like “The Leaf at Love she called her “ecstasy in living.” With voting among participating Museum members). Appropri- radical emptiness (a condition without Turned Back,” Whicher sifted poem after remarkable tact and delicacy, Wilbur ately enough: Pollan says apples used to symbolize sweet- . . . To call land ‘sweet’ was a way of saying it answered hope, indifferent to change, which defies poem for evidence of “emotional crisis” reasoned that Dickinson “dealt with her ness itself: they “were part and parcel of a sweet landscape. our desires.” “search” and has “no home”). The word and “tragic frustration” over love denied. sentiment of lack” by repeatedly assert-

20 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 21 ing the paradox that to renounce is to possess. He observed that she even warned callers whom she re- The House An Appreciation of Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) fused to see that “We shun because we prize.” By Richard Wilbur By Tom Daley Furthermore, for Wilbur, Dickinson’s chief source Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes of a near “contempt” for everyday life and “earthly e-reading her remarkable oeuvre in the wake of her sudden poem that I’ve ever read, with the exception of the erotic, gal- circumstance” originated in her awareness that For a last look at that white house she knew Rand untimely demise, one gets the sense that the poet and loping, sexy poems of Wyatt. Much other Dickinson work is not the poetic impulses that visited her were what she In sleep alone, and held no title to, teacher Lucie Brock-Broido was constantly preparing herself so real to me; it is much more mystical and less bodily.” She calls “Bulletins … / From Immortality” (Fr820, And had not entered yet, for all her sighs. for her ending – and for our own. In the very first poem of was somewhat less kind about Dickinson’s poems in an interview “Sumptuous Despair”). Heaven was what she looked her collection, The Master Letters, poems that act as a kind of with Carole Maso for BOMB magazine (“Lucie Brock-Broido” for in all things lovable and desirable in this world, elegant amplification, a baroque expansion, of Dickinson’s by Carole Maso, October 1, 1995): “I had always turned away and for her, only the inspired words of a poem could What did she tell me of that house of hers? White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door; much commented on trio of letters to an unknown “Master,” from Dickinson’s poems, I thought she was precious; I didn’t anticipate God’s far-off paradise. He liked to say that Brock-Broido finishes, “I / remember how cold I will be” (from get it. Then I began to read her letters. These, I fathomed. And “the clarity and repose” of heaven came to Emily A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore; “Carrowmore”). Answering Dickinson’s “The Figures I have seen if there were such things as visitations, then I would have had Dickinson not through love or creeds or fame but in Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs. / Set orderly, for Burial, / Reminded me, them. Though, just for the record, no what she called her “work.” From this, her art, she of mine” (Fr355), Brock-Broido calls one has appeared in a white dress by my claimed that she could not “lift [her] Forehead” in Is she now there, wherever there may be? to mind, with characteristic sharpness, fireplace.” “Curiosity” about what other people call life (Fr995). Only a foolish man would hope to find “The tear in the body’s tailored skin / Like the Siberian boy in autopsy / In her prose poem, “To a Strange Some readers might object that, by focusing so in- That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind. Stitched shut at last, & asymmetrically” Fashion of Forsaking” (The Master tently on what he considers Emily Dickinson’s su- Night after night, my love, I put to sea. (from “Housekeeping”). Letters), Brock-Broido approximates a periority to earthly circumstance, Wilbur seems to Dickinsonian progression. Speculation neglect the immense delight she took as a poet in the From Anterooms: New Poems and Translation by Richard Brock-Broido’s four books of poetry (“I think I may have never touched your people and things of this world. While he admired Wilbur. Copyright 2010 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by have been highly acclaimed, starting linen, nor your skin”) precedes dreary her snake and hummingbird lyrics, he lavished finer with critic Helen Vendler’s enthusias- assessment, buttressed by a place-based attention upon her poems about eternity, immortali- permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. tic but measured New Yorker review analogy (Dickinson’s “vats along the ty, and the grand vistas of an imaginary second Eden (August 7, 1989) of her first collection, Rhine” fall away to “a small Berlin that marked “the reunion of souls in Heaven.” But A Hunger. As director of the poetry of snow”): “It is winter again. What one might ask, What of her flowers, so carefully described: the have been born.” Yet, although Wilbur’s poetic voice was es- concentration for Columbia Univer- with crimped winds . . . I think it will clover (her “Purple Democrat”), the gentian, the daisy? sentially one of praise, its music included the complications sity’s writing program and a leader of be always this one way.” But even the of loss, of grief and disappointment. Such complexity enabled a renowned workshop at her home in chill fails to smother the small thermals What of the trees tossed by storms, the birds, the moon? him to value the minute attentions Emily Dickinson paid to Cambridge, Massachusetts (which I of passion on which the speaker floats, discerning what he thought of as the motions of her soul. was privileged to participate in, albe- birdlike: “I am seized with a small fever Readers today might wish that Wilbur acknowledged more ful- it as a somewhat contrarian student), now; I cannot get small enough.” ly the pleasure he took from Dickinson’s pleasure in homely In an inaugural poem called “The House,” of a last collection Brock-Broido trained many of the lead- detail: buckets, shawls, buzzing flies. For he himself was a entitled Anterooms (2010), Wilbur wrote a tribute to his be- ing and emerging lights of today’s aca- Like Dickinson, Brock-Broido experi- poet who sang of “crab legs,” “Merry-go-round rings,” “fine loved wife Charlee, who died in 2007. In language reminiscent demic poetry world. enced writing as a duty, a compulsion, / Ruddy-skinned pears,” laundry, lilacs, and (famously) that of Dickinson’s in elegies for a lost lover, it recalls the dream something not to be set aside, regard- “underground grower,” “beautiful only to hunger”: the potato. Charlee often had before waking of a “white house” that was Emily Dickinson served, not as a muse less of the cost. She was not unaware And while it is true that Dickinson was deprived of some of the to be her “haven.” Faithfully, he evokes her description of it: a exactly, but as a companion in the of her genius, her uniqueness, and, per- greatest experiences – of being a mother or rearing a child, for white gatepost, terrace, fanlight, “a widow’s walk,” and “salt confrontation with creation that was haps like Dickinson, understood that example – she spoke warmly about them occasionally in letters winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.” Brock-Broido’s work. Her engagement there wasn’t anyone else who could but never wrote of desiring them for herself. In this way, she with Dickinson’s letters afforded her solve the problem of poetry the way she was apparently satisfied with leading her circumscribed life in The grieving narrator (admitting he is “foolish”) asks a mo- springboards as opposed to beacons. did. Writing made it possible for her to what she thrillingly called “my palace in the dew” (L89). mentous question of a listening but unresponsive universe: “Is The poems were less of an inspiration. Photo Credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald shave the chin and ear hairs of her de- she there now, wherever there may be?” And in the beautiful Nevertheless, “Dickinson,” Brock-Broido told Henri Cole in an mons and plait them into tropes – not to restrain them, but to Many of Richard Wilbur’s poems are about heavens on earth, last line that expresses his devotion, hope, and yearning, he interview for Harvard Review (Fall 1995), “has written the great charm and co-opt them. If the speaker of Dickinson’s “Of Bronze even as one of Dickinson’s poems imagines rowing in an earth- addresses his dead wife: ly Eden where lovers reunite. She never declared as simply as poem that has to do with real life: ‘First – Chill – then Stupor – and Blaze” (Fr319) could talk slightingly of her “Splendors” as – then the letting go – .’ Most poems, for me, don’t necessarily a “Menagerie,” Brock-Broido exploited exoticism as much as the Wilbur did in a late poem, “Psalm”: “pronounce it / Good to Night after night, my love, I put to sea. have to do with real life. But #341 [Fr372] is the most accurate quotidian. Her caterpillars spun a silk from evening news-hour

22 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 23 tragedies, from literary and historical allusions, from shatteringly of whom took the summer off from my workshop to join Lucie’s told me there’s a rule at Harvard where students can leave after cogent private images – and she fashioned them into a brocade crew for alternative instruction) in the group, trade rumors, and twenty minutes if a professor doesn’t show up.” She could be A Glooming Peace This Morning With it Brings polished to a high gloss with the chamois of her febrile imagi- debate the merits of various living poetic luminaries. She would sure no one had left before her entrance. nation. grin slyly as I compared calf muscles of the men who had worn The sedative of frost composes shorts that evening, Many years later, I saw her perform a bit of pure and glorious Its infinity of dormant melodramas A little shy of the contemporary American academic prejudice drama at a reading during an Association of Writers & Writing against rhyming poetry (most of her workshop participants con- When a poem was workshopped, Lucie would carefully yet swift- Programs conference in Boston. Lucie took the stage with On the glass. It consoles one, sidered my full rhymes regrettably passé), she pointed out to me ly inspect its jugular, and after gently accessing that vein, she breathtaking panache. Striding across the platform in her ten- The solstice of the hour’s no in private that much of her poetry rhymed (to say they “chimed” would pump the blood of the poem through her own remarkable league boots, her swaggering gown bleached whiter than a would be more accurate – consonantal and assonantal repetitions dialysis-capable critical imagination and produce something ut- disc of snow, she blended histrionic humility with a casual Apparent motion, standing still. in the couplets or between the couplets, à la some of Emily Dick- terly cleansed and reconstituted. She always honored something imperiousness. She would shiver her famous mane of blonde hair It contents one, the solace of inson), but that most people didn’t notice it. of the original in this process, and while some participants would that reached to her keister as she intoned the lines from her poems be devastated by the radical metamorphosis, most of them ap- with lips painted in the hussy-tint of some scarlet experiment. Form & phantasm, of sieve If Dickinson, as stories had it, would regale guests at parties preciated the extraordinary creation that resulted. While I valued & specter, root & disposition. at the home of her brother Austin and his wife Susan with her the lively debate that would ensue in response to her retrofitting As much of a public personality as she was, she had some of haphazard piano playing and her anecdotes, Brock-Broido was (she discouraged sycophancy in students by being perfectly re- Dickinson’s penchant for reclusiveness. She would often disap- The difference between desire & compulsion renowned as an entertainer, too. Blending daiquiris (rum provid- spectful of any opposition), I wasn’t sure having a teacher, even pear in late autumn and early winter to concentrate her extraor- Is that one is wanting, one is warding off. ed by the students) for participants in her annual twice-weekly one as brilliant as Lucie, rewrite one’s poem was such a good dinary faculties of poetic composition, and only a small circle of summer poetry workshop at her Cambridge home, she would an- way to learn how to compose. I would sometimes argue she was her beloved, including her three sisters, was granted access to her Consort—submission is a form of brawling imate the pre-workshop social hour with a ribald cackle and a paring away the meat of the fruit with the rind. She respected my during her hibernation. Of the hearts, & one is Sped—a stroke or flaw crinkling coo. Some of her long-time students would trade barbs judgment, and sometimes conceded I might have a point about and quips with her. No one could ever accuse Lucie, as Dickin- something, but was rarely swayed from her initial impulse. “The Poets light but Lamps,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “Them- Inflicted northward, southward, pardoned still. son did the “Gentlewomen” of Amherst, of “dimity conviction” selves go out” (Fr930). It is hard to believe that the flame of A plague on both our wills. (Fr675). When she complained about the humidity, using the She had a touch of the shaman about her, but a shaman who might Lucie Brock-Broido’s memorable personality, comedienne- Yiddish word for “sweating,” “I’ve been schvitzing all day!” one have been more at home working her tongue-in-cheek sleight-of- cum-sage-cum-bard-cum-master teacher, has been snuffed out. “A Glooming Peace This Morning With it Brings” from The wag retorted, “Lucie, ladies don’t schvitz.” hand on a stage in the borscht belt than in a room rinsed out with I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I know that Lucie was quite Master Letters: Poems by Lucie Brock-Broido, copyright © sage smoke (tobacco was her preferred herb, anyhow). She was certain that “This World is not Conclusion” (Fr373). I am not 1995 by Lucie Brock-Broido. Used by permission of Alfred A. The furnishings in her house would not have seemed out of place utterly convinced of a spiritual realm, but uninterested in abste- sure that she knew the poem, but I imagine that she would have Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, at Austin and Susan’s manse, The Evergreens. The air of her lair miousness or self-mortification as a gangway to cross over to been enthralled with the notion that, rather than summoning an a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. was lush with velvet drapes, her windows blockaded with white that realm. Though the speakers of her poems had grand visions angel with a harp and candle, Death could carry “the Waning cotton curtains. Her domain constituted a chapel of antiques – a of reincarnation, and were even occasionally vainglorious about lamp / That lit the Drummer from the Camp / To purer Reveille!” couch in the shape of a sleigh, a fat, old dictionary on a stand their psychic powers, she had a sense of humor about it all, and (Fr322). proud as a book of the Gospels on a lectern in a cathedral. Emily no doubt would have smiled a wide smile whenever she came From “LB2: An Appreciation, Dickinson had her brown Newfoundland, Carlo; Lucie had her across that famous exchange in Henry IV, Part I: Opposite is a Brock-Broido poem (from The Master Letters) in by Ellen Davis, Bulletin 5.1, 1993 succession of Maine Coon cats, one of which, she bragged, was which resonances with the Dickinson project can be discerned to have had a fellowship named after it at Columbia. Many of the GLENDOWER – the aphoristic impulse, the grandiloquent gesture, the taut To envision this majestic figure [of the Master], books in her library were arranged by the color of their spines, I can call spirits from the vasty deep. phrasing. The title, as the poet notes, “is taken from the Prince’s Brock-Broido reads, as she put it, “any heroic I can but she could always find one she was looking for in a flash. Per- I can summon spirits from the deep ocean. speech in the last act, final scene ofRomeo & Juliet” The last line get my hands on” – Donne, Lowell, Michelangelo’s haps as an homage to Dickinson, her preferred garb was a shin- slightly twists Mercutio’s curse on the Montagues and Capulets, sonnets. All of her current poems are Master Letters, length white gown, often secured at the waist by a weightlifter’s HOTSPUR “A plague o’ both your houses!” addressed to an absent Beloved. As she puts it in her belt and brushing the tops of black boots. Why, so can I, or so can any man, notes to the group published in the September/Octo- But will they come when you do call for them? ber 1991 issue of American Poetry Review, “On the She seldom initiated gossip, but she relished the savory tidbit, fabrication of the Poem: I have come to the Faith that the ridiculous send-up, the puerile parody of someone’s German Theatrics were part of the persona. The first time I heard her Tom Daley is the author of House You Cannot Reach—Poems in all poems are letters to God. Else – failing that faith – name that lent itself to punning. She and I would stay up till read (at Adams House at Harvard), she was seriously, ridiculous- the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems (FutureCycle Press) then all poems are railings against the fact that there all hours (she often didn’t sleep until noon) after the workshop ly late. One of Lucie’s acolytes asked another, when she final- and a play, Every Broom and Bridget—Emily Dickinson and Her is no God, after all.” One poet asked her this: When the one summer I actually was enrolled in it (I was honored to ly breezed in, “Should we stand up?” Lucie, who would never Irish Servants. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in will the Master write you back?” An oblique Lucie think she thought of me as a colleague as much as her student), apologize for something as insignificant as keeping a crowd of Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Witness, Crazyhorse, answer was to quote Emily Dickinson (L190): “I dont and when I would visit in subsequent years as a kind of guest seventy-five people waiting for half an hour, began her reading Denver Quarterly, and the Emily Dickinson International Society know who it is, that sings, nor did I would I tell!” critic. We would evaluate the progress of different poets (some by announcing, with bad-girl bravado, “Professor Vendler just Bulletin.

24 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 25 Reviews of Publications Reviews of Publications

Matthew Zapruder and Jill Bialosky’s In the Afterword, “Poetry and Poets in a to accessorize the feminist/witchy life- Renée Bergland, Book Review Editor books respond more directly to our current Time of Crisis,” Zapruder’s questions echo style. That stuff gets expensive. mood of crisis (in the world, in the Unit- Bialosky’s. “What, in these times, must we Ben Lerner ty and at times he is a little too knowing, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, ed States, in English Departments). Poetry do? Can poetry help save us?” His answers Many social critics have ruminated on The Hatred of Poetry. Farrar Strauss and but he is perceptive, insightful, critically where it will be deepened, not dispelled, Will Save Your Life by Jill Bialosky is part are hopeful: “Poems are imaginative struc- the current glut of feminist products that Giroux 2016. sharp, and swooningly romantic / bitingly and where, by creating a place for possibil- memoir, part anthology, and part defense tures built out of words, ones that any read- seem to have little connection to any post-romantic. Spoiler: Lerner doesn’t hate ity and present absences (like unheard mel- of poetry. The book contains 32 very brief er can enter. They are places of freedom, form of principled or philosophically Robert Hass poetry, though he claims that everyone who odies), it might come to resemble love.” It essays (“Discovery,” “Danger,” “Wonder,” enlivenment, true communion.” Zapruder grounded response to patriarchy. As for A Little Book on Form: An Exploration cares about poetry half hates it because it is a compelling, if slightly twisted, plea. I and so on). Each chapter starts with a few declares, “The role of poetry in our time of me, I am not sure if I am thrilled or ap- into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. always falls short of the ideal. At first, Le- am reading Learner’s book in 2018, and paragraphs describing a memory, presents crisis is the same as always: to preserve our palled that this commodified feminism HarperCollins 2017 rner is ironic. He quotes Sidney’s disdain times have changed. I like his complex, a poem, and then explains what the poem minds and language so we may be strong for has infiltrated my favorite genre of lit- for those who “cannot hear the ‘planet like ironic stance – exemplified by urging that means to Bialosky. She is a clear writer, whatever is to come. And also, to preserve erature: mass-market works tangentially Jill Bialosky music of poetry,’” and then he instantly we “perfect our contempt” for poetry, but it sincere and direct. At times the brevity of the possibility of mutual understanding, not related to Emily Dickinson. Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir. Si- follows the quotation with a parenthetical, makes me nostalgic for that long-ago time, these essays is frustrating. It’s not possible by arguing for it, but by demonstrating it.” I mon and Schuster 2017 Marianne-Moore style one liner: “(I, too, two years ago, when we had time for such to get completely caught up in the narrative am convinced that Zapruder’s lifelong atten- This spring sees the arrival of two sur- can’t hear it.)” Later on, Lerner’s Hatred subtleties. and her comments on the poetry can’t go tion to Dickinson helped him to formulate prisingly similar books that touch on Matthew Zapruder of Poetry drops the quotation marks, and very deep. But the structure works, largely this remarkably inclusive poetics of possi- Dickinson. First there is Literary Witch- Why Poetry. HarperCollins 2017. takes up Sidney’s phrase – “the planet-like Robert Hass’s Little Book on Form was because Bialosky has such a good eye for bility. es: A Celebration of Magical Women music of poetry” – as its own expression of published in 2017, but Hass started work- a poem. Familiar verses by Robert Frost or Writers by Taisia Kitaiskaia, illustrat- t the height of the Elizabethan era, Sir a twenty-first century poetics. ing on it in 1995, when he was teaching at Emily Dickinson feel new in this context, Taken together, Lerner, Hass, Bialosky and ed by Katy Horan (Hachette 2017) and APhilip Sidney responded to a flurry the Iowa writer’s workshop. Like Lerner’s, while less familiar poems feel exciting. Bi- Zapruder offer four compelling discussions then there is The Little Book of Feminist of publications debating the social impor- Although The Hatred of Poetry was pub- Hass’s title is deceptive. The book is not lit- alosky concludes by describing poetry as of the importance of poetry. It shocks me Saints by Julia Pierpont, illustrated by tance of poetry with his Apology for Poet- lished in 2016, context clues reveal that tle at all – it is long (446 pages) and, para- “that flicker of light in a dark wood.” Her that in two short years we have moved from Manjit Thapp (Random House 2018). ry. In 1821, as romanticism crested, Percy Lerner had been working on the book for doxically, almost formless – a shaggy com- book offers many flickers of hope. Lerner’s elegant postromantic ironies to Both books present a collection of wom- Bysshe Shelley wrote his Defence of Poet- years. Lerner defends Barack Obama for pilation of notes, studded with numbered Zapruder’s wholehearted romanticism, but en, Dickinson among them, lovingly ry. Although it’s not clear that Ben Lern- having invited Elizabeth Alexander to read lists. Hass describes it as “a book about Finally, I turn to Matthew Zapruder’s it comforts me that in all of these books, po- sketched on pages facing bite-size de- er, Robert Hass, Jill Bialosky or Matthew at his inauguration in 2009, and responds the formal imagination in poetry.” It is not thought-provoking and wholly engaging etry offers sustaining possibility. In different scriptions of why these women are cool. Zapruder have written the sorts of books to jeremiads against contemporary poet- clear where to shelve this book, or how to Why Poetry. This volume is more an invita- ways, Lerner, Hass, Bialosky and Zapruder that will endure for centuries, it is striking ry by George Packer (on The New Yorker use it; it may be a little too informal and tion than a defense. Zapruder says, “I’d like kindle hope on this dark planet. The introduction to Literary Witches ex- that the past year or two have called forth website in 2009) and Mark Edmundson unmethodical to assign for a class, but it is to think that this book is, itself, an example plains “the mantle of “Literary Witch” so many defenses of poetry. Maybe it’s a (in Harper’s in 2013). Lerner sees Packer a little too useful to leave out. It is chock in prose of Keats’s famous concept of neg- is the highest honor we can bestow upon bad sign: Poetry is under attack. On the and Edmundson as white male universal- full of good stuff: Poets and aspiring po- ative capability, saying no to a certain kind Taisia Kitaiskaia an author. The thirty writers included other hand, maybe it’s a very good sign: ists, and he draws on the works of Alexan- ets will find inspiration and insight; critics of rigidity in thinking, to open up the cre- Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magi- here inspire us deeply, urging us to be Perhaps we are living in a golden age. der and Rankine (and a host of others who and teachers will find themselves wanting ative possibility of a new form of attention, cal Women Writers. Hachette 2017 creatively courageous. We’ve crafted don’t identify as universalizing white men) to crib the good lines and the explanatory of understanding.” Like Bialosky’s book, their portraits in art and writing to pay Ben Lerner’s slim paperback, The Ha- to argue against a white male upper mid- strategies. Like many books of poems, this Why Poetry is “a combination of memoir, Julia Pierpont homage to their presences, and access tred of Poetry, distills the quintessence dle class standard of “greatness.” His best is not a book for reading cover-to-cover; it analysis and argument” – but since Zapruder The Little Book of Feminist Saints. Ran- their spirits through our own mediums.” of Brooklyn hipster-poet into an elegant examples come from Dickinson, and make is one for sustained (and repeated) brows- went to Amherst College as an undergrad- dom House Meanwhile, Julia Pierpont’s introduc- green booklet that is a perfect accessory this brief polemic particularly interesting ing. It is no accident that the book is put uate and then returned to the University of tion says, “I would argue that all the for an afternoon at a pour-over coffee shop. to Dickinsonians. Lerner concludes, “All together this way: Hass is very smart about Massachusetts in Amherst for his MFA, Reviewed by Annelise Brinck-Johnsen women in this book have done some- One struggles to resist making fun of it, I ask the haters – and I, too, am one – is form, and he has structured the book to en- his memoir will be of particular interest to thing with their lives that makes them and yet – it is really good. Lerner is wit- that they strive to perfect their contempt, courage exploration. Dickinsonians. Zapruder confesses, “Often spent last summer listening to Lorde’s worthy idols. So let this be the little, I used to visit her grave in Amherst, Massa- I Melodrama on repeat. Eventually, I secular book of feminist saints.” chusetts, when I was first studying poetry, to bought a flow-y black cotton slip and ask for help or just put a little trinket on top told all my friends I was embracing the The women collected in both books are of her gravestone. . . . Perhaps, in my worst, “modern witch aesthetic,” which prom- undoubtedly inspiring, even if the books The Bulletin welcomes notices of all Dickinson-related books, including those published outside the U.S. most desperate moments, I expected her to inent Millennial publications from Vox themselves do not feel particularly orig- Send information to Renée Bergland, 3 Barrett Road, Hanover, NH 03755, U.S.A. answer.” As I read through Why Poetry, I be- to Medium assured me was “very in.” inal. They hark back to Judy Chicago’s Email: [email protected] gan to believe that Dickinson had answered Unfortunately, I was never able to buy “The Dinner Party,” with its massive tri- Zapruder’s call. all the crystals and tarot cards I needed angular table with specific hand-painted

26 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 27 Reviews of Publications Reviews of Publications

tableware and hand-embroidered deco- ground). Unlike Pierpont’s unflinching- feminist consumption and coffee table Enikő Bollobás of order through the reading of “Four Trees,” bás and Donald Wesling claim in their “Free rations for prominent women, including ly grim and well-received debut novel, books are no replacement for tangible Vendégünk a végtelenből. Emily Dickin- complemented by a short presentation of the verse” article in The Princeton Encyclopedia Emily Dickinson. Chicago’s work was Among the Ten Thousand Things (2015), progress towards political goals. These son költészete [Our Visitor from Infini- ebbs and flows of scholarly reception. Five of Poetry and Poetics, is suited to the poet- ground-breaking and complex, valoriz- The Little Book of Feminist Saints bends books are intended to serve as feminist tude. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry]. Buda- chapters follow this introduction, devoted to ic sensibility capturing, in a manner typical ing traditionally female artistic pursuits over backwards to make itself accessible celebrations of women. This is well and pest, Balassi, 2015. the poet’s life, the formal and linguistic as- of Dickinson, one-time events (as opposed and remembering women whom history and upbeat. The inspirational goal of the good, but despite the clever design and pects of poetic voice, modes of addressing to repetitive events) and poetic voice that is often overlooks. I imagine that the cre- book becomes clearer the more entries carefully crafted paragraphs, binders Reviewed by Pál Hegyi topics, tropes and cognitive processes, and “thickened by sound and visual effects that ators of these books see their reclama- one reads. Dickinson, “The Matron Saint full of women are inadequate. The wom- her gender roles. will not be echoed later on.” tion of the title “Witch” or “Saint” as of Verse,” is noted as being “not shy,” en, including Dickinson, are flattened ungarian readers have been no strang- a similar feminist interruption of male and valorized in the most Lean-In terms: out, made the same, tokenized. Both of Hers to Dickinson’s poetry: already in Biography is presented as a string of puzzling In the section devoted to thematic Bollobás historiography. Perhaps feminists need “Though this major American Female these books are perfect as inoffensive the 1930s some of the best Hungarian poets facts complemented by possible answers to does not discuss the individual Dickinsonian to continually re-insert women into his- poet published little in her lifetime, she gifts for someone with nascent feminist published their translations in the most pres- the questions posed by Dickinson’s life re- themes themselves but rather the ways Dick- torical, religious, and literary narratives. actively sought out professional connec- tendencies, but that is hollow praise. On tigious literary journal of the time, Nyugat cord. Moreover, facts are presented both in inson addresses her various topics. Among Maybe the work of re-claiming is never tions.” If Pierpont’s book inspires noth- the bright side, it is worth noting that [West], presenting them as the surprising the context of current biographies and current these the author gives detailed analyses to the truly finished. ing else, the idea of Dickinson’s letters much like patriarchy and neoliberal cap- works of an eccentric “lady poet.” Then in critical thematics such as Dickinson’s Calvin- aesthetics of process, modes of introspection to Thomas Wentworth Higginson as an italism, Dickinson’s relevance endures. the 1970s there came a Dickinson fad of ism, her idea of celibacy, the possible men in and self-examination, her explorations of Yet despite the explicitly stated po- early form of LinkedIn could surely lead sorts, when a new generation of readers was her life, the possible identity of the Master, consciousness and the psyche as remnants litical intentions of these books, they to another book. One of Kitaiskaia’s selected Dickin- taken by her poetry. The bright green vol- withdrawal from the world, friendship with of Puritan spiritual exercises, her determina- cannot help but feel de-politicized and son poems is also a favorite of mine: “I ume containing nearly two hundred poems Carlo the Newfoundland, illnesses, and pos- tion to try to understand cognitive and even de-fanged. Chicago’s yonic pottery was Like Pierpont, Taisia Kitaiskaia has ear- dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than in the translation of the leading woman poet es. pre-cognitive processes side by side with her deemed shocking in 1979 and initially lier literary credentials under her belt, Prose.” I can think of no better mantra of Hungary, Amy Károlyi, soon sold in over doubts of knowing, the Self as the locus of all struggled to find a permanent home. In though hers are more witchy – she wrote for facing these dispiriting times. ten thousand copies. And although the canon Poetic voice is the topic of the next chapter, explorations, and its recurring mise en abyme contrast, The Little Book of Feminist the hairpin’s “Ask Baba Yaga” column, was somewhat eclectic, and Hungarian Dick- dealing with the peculiarities of syntax, se- type conceptualizations. Saints was made to be sold at an Urban which was turned into a 2016 book of Annelise Brinck-Johnsen is a graduate stu- inson’s voice was somewhat mannered and mantics, orthography, punctuation, as well Outfitters by a bored teen making min- the same name. Literary Witches is sur- dent in Women’s Studies at Oxford University. affected, the phenomenon looked quite au- as verse form, including stanzaic structure, Exploring, in the longest and perhaps most imum wage – indeed since reading it I prisingly multivalent: beguiling and thentic and powerful. With Károlyi’s superb prosody and rhyme scheme. Performing her important chapter of the book, the close have seen it at every single bookstore disturbing. In addition to short biog- introduction and the selection from the letters readings on the original English texts in this correspondence between ways of knowing I have entered, next to other similarly raphies (similar to Pierpont’s), each of framing the volume came the promise that, chapter (as opposed to the rest of the book on the one hand and figures and tropes on well-designed books. Maybe this indi- Kitaiskaia’s entries includes imagina- no matter how peculiar and difficult, this poet where Hungarian translations are interpret- the other, Bollobás surveys the outstanding cates a “win” for feminism. For better or tive descriptions of each literary wom- Briefly Noted was knowable. ed), Bollobás systematically surveys Dick- tropes of this most “polytropic” poet. She worse these books feel more like tokens an’s suitably witchy behaviour: “YOU inson’s defamiliarization techniques at the suggests, for example, that the recurrent than works intended to spark serious MIGHT notice a comely mink in the BBC In our Time, May 11, 2017: Emily Dickinson as a scholarly subject came to be various levels of language, deviating from the impulse to deny – her “philosophy of no” challenges to misogyny. Amherst woods, whispering to a pond. Dickinson. rigorously explored in Hungary in the 1980s, received norms not only of poetic language (quite similar to the one described by Gas- Every year, Emily possesses this par- primarily through the efforts of Enikő Bollo- of the time, but of American English itself. ton Bachelard much later) – is actually an A collection of inspiring women is a ticular mink to recite her new poems, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ bás: radio programs addressing the general Dickinson writes in a prosody of approxima- impulse to reconcile and adjust, provoking perfect thing to buy a girl you vaguely in mink language, to her best reader, b08p5lbp public and conference talks and essays, both tion, or vers libéré, which Bollobás in another paradox and oxymoron as its figurative ve- know on some occasion on the way to the black pond.” Further, Kitaiskaia in- in Hungarian and English, geared toward the essay connects with the style of Symbolism hicles. Similarly, metaphor is the trope fitting adulthood – Bat Mitzvah, Confirmation, cludes a miniature recommended read- If eavesdropping on the conversation academic community. Her work of several or high modernism (“Measures of Attention: Dickinson’s ethos of transition, her careful Quinceañera, high school graduation, ing list for each of her subjects. For in an Oxbridge Senior Common Room decades culminated in a monograph, pub- On the Grammetrics of Lineation in William attention to transformation and metamor- 18th birthday. If you don’t know her, why Dickinson she recommends Franklin’s sounds interesting to you, then you might lished (in Hungarian) in 2015 with the title, Carlos Williams’ Poetry.” Poetry and Epis- phosis, and her insistence on internal-exter- not buy a book where she can learn some The Poems of Emily Dickinson and a enjoy Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, a Vendégünk a végtelenből. Emily Dickinson temology. Turning Points in the History of nal correspondences, while catachresis – and basic facts about women’s history that few selected poems clearly chosen by high-culture weekly show on BBC Ra- költészete [Our Visitor from Infinitude. Emily Poetic Knowledge, eds. Roland Hagenbüch- here Bollobás is further developing her thesis may recently have been scrubbed from Kitaiskaia herself. Despite my dour out- dio Four that is available as a free pod- Dickinson’s Poetry]. le and Laura Skandera [1986]). But Dickin- expounded in her Emily Dickinson Journal her school’s syllabus? look on commercialized feminism, I was cast or streaming. On May 11, 2017, son also prefigures the prosody of the other essay (Spring 2012) – is the trope of the “un- charmed by Literary Witches. Perhaps, In Our Time focused on Emily Dickin- The book starts with a scholarly Auftakt pull- modernist tradition, the radical modernism of thought,” the unknowable, the unthinkable, The quotidian commercial nature of our to paraphrase Donna Haraway, I would son and featured scholars Fiona Green, ing the reader into the core of Dickinson’s Pound and Williams, which develops its spe- or the trope of pre-cognition and Whitehead- present moment suffuses every page of rather be a witch than a saint. Páraic Finnerty, and Linda Freedman. “strangeness” and modernity: the discussion cific visual rhythm punctuated by lineation to ian “prehension.” The author also discusses The Little Book of Feminist Saints despite The episode offers a good introduction of uncertainty and unknowing as the condi- correspond to the units of attention, and with Dickinson’s metonymy as the figure of a Thapp’s colourful illustrations (Dick- Listening to an album or buying a dress to Dickinson and a remarkably pleasant tion humaine through the analysis of “I heard the function of de-automatizing the reading discourse of evasion, and synecdoche as the inson, in white against a purple back- does not a true witch make; conscious 53 minutes of intelligent talk. a Fly Buzz” (Fr465) and of Dickinson’s idea process. This is the verse form that, as Bollo- vehicle of mise en abyme.

28 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 29 Reviews of Publications Members’ News

The discussion of tropes continues in the gender normativity is carried by metaphor) non-native speaker’s subtle attentions to lan- final chapter in which Bollobás differenti- while catachresis is the trope of gender per- guage as well as her intimate familiarity with New EDIS Board Member-At-Large ates between two modes of performativity formativity (since gender alterity is carried the Dickinson corpus and criticism. in Dickinson’s poems on gender roles: the by catachresis). performance of existing social scripts and Li-Hsin Hsu the performing of acts that do not rely on ex- Language, thinking, tropes, and gender: Pál Hegyi is Assistant Professor at Eöt- isting scripts. Further developing her theses these are perhaps the keywords that run vös Loránd University, Budapest, teaching expounded in her writings on performativity through Bollobás’s Dickinson monograph. 19th and 20th century US literature. He i-Hsin Hsu, the newest member-at-large of the and trope (for example, “Performing Texts/ She discusses a canon that both includes the has a monograph on Paul Auster; his up- LEDIS Board, expands the international repre- Performing Readings,” “Troping the Un- long-time favorites and expands to poems coming book delineates similarities in the sentation on the Board of this international society thought”), Bollobás claims that metaphor that do not fit the received Dickinson im- poetics of early 19th-century and contem- from two to three. She will join the Board in Au- is the trope of gender performance (since age. Bollobás’s readings are informed by a porary American popular fiction. gust 2018. “I have been a beneficiary of the gen- erous support of the Emily Dickinson International Society in the past,” she says, “and I am keen on contributing to the society by promoting EDIS to a O eu, o outro e o mundo / The Self, the Other, and the World broader audience outside the US.” By George Monteiro She hopes to help expand EDIS membership and generate interest in Dickinson internationally by engaging more pedagogical as well as academic so- n October 25, 2017, in its series enti- Sire – two Legacies – ” (trans. Aíla de Ol- iveira Gomes), “After great pain, a formal cieties and institutions in Asia to form partnerships tled “Reading with the Ears,” the Cul- iveira Gomes), “Too scanty ‘twas to die for feeling comes” (trans. Carlos Daghlian), O with EDIS. She would like to strengthen a tighter tura Inglesa (São Paulo, Brazil) devoted an you” (trans. Aíla de Oliveira Gomes), “Bee! “The soul selects her own society” (trans. connection between EDIS and the Far East by work- evening to the poems and letters of Emily I’m expecting you!” (trans. Isa Mara Lan- Paulo Vizioli), “Of Course – I prayed – ” ing with scholars from EDIS’s chapters in Japan Dickinson read in the original English and do), “My friend must be a Bird – ” (trans. (trans. Isa Mara Lando), “I asked no other and China to arrange Dickinson-related symposia, in Portuguese translation. The texts were Jorge de Sena), “For each ecstatic instant” thing – ” (trans. Aíla de Oliveira Gomes), translation workshops and poetry-reading events chosen by Munira Mutran and Antonie- (trans. Aíla de Oliveira Gomes), “The Heart “Because I could not stop for Death – ” for local high schools, universities and international ta Celani, who put the program together. asks Pleasure – first – ” (trans. Aíla de Ol- (trans. Alcina Brasileiro Hall), “I’m No- The performance was commemorated body! Who are you?” (trans. Augusto book festivals. To that end, she would bring more in this 48-page, undated booklet pub- de Campos), “I died for Beauty – but international Dickinson scholars to Asia. Sponsor- lished by the Cultura Inglesa. was scarce” (trans. Cecilia Meireles), ship of the Taiwanese government would facilitate the possibility of nese during the 2014 Dickinson conference in Shanghai, and last De- “Pain – has an Element of Blank – ” lecture tours in Taiwan and around Asia, “so that the attention of more cember, she organized a poetry-translation workshop, inviting a well- This bilingual booklet reproduces the (trans. Aíla de Oliveira Gomes), “I rea- Asian poetry readers, students and scholars could be brought to under- known Dickinson translator in Taiwan to give a talk on the challenges Dickinson letters and poems read on son, Earth is short – ” (trans. Aíla de standing and appreciating Dickinson’s works.” Moreover, she hopes of translating Dickinson into Chinese. She has held poetry-reading the occasion. Oliveira Gomes), “Nature rarer uses that collaborations between the US and Asia could also be increased salons in her department, featuring translation works of Dickinson, Yellow,” (trans. Isa Mara Lando), “Tell with the involvement of local artists, poets, musicians and translators and as editor of The Wenshan Review, she has sought to bring local The full letters (translated by Fernanda all the truth but tell it slant – ” (trans. to work with Dickinson scholars through electronic media to generate interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies to a wider audience. Mourão) are 187, 261, and 265 (as they Aíla de Oliveira Gomes), “What is – cross-cultural, experimental artworks and translations. appear in Thomas H. Johnson’s The ‘Paradise’” (trans. Carlos Daghlian and Her research interests include Dickinson studies, Romanticism, trans- Letters of Emily Dickinson, 1958) and Rogério Choclay), and “Our share of Li-Hsin is an Associate Professor of English at National Chengc- atlantic studies, reception history, Orientalism, and ecocriticism. Most three short quotations from unidentified night to bear – ” (trans. Aíla de Oliveira hi University, in Taipei, where she serves as chief editor of the in- recently, she has been working on a project funded by the Taiwan letters (translated by Munira Mutran). Gomes). Cherise Silvestri read Dickin- ternational journal, The Wenshan Review (the Literary Mountain). Ministry of Science and Technology involving Dickinson and two The poems included are “This is my let- son’s original texts. Lígia Cortez read She has taught a regular course in Emily Dickinson Studies for the Taiwanese poets. Part of the project explores Dickinson’s Asian re- ter to the World” (trans. Aíla de Olivei- the translations. postgraduate program of her department and has helped increase the ceptions and aesthetic connections by looking at “Asia’s Dickinson” ra Gomes), “Love – thou art high – ” number of students working on Dickinson in the past few years. In in a contemporary Taiwanese context. (trans. Isa Mara Lando), “Love – is an- Illustrated throughout with several fa- 2014 and 2017, she gained Taiwanese government sponsorship to terior to Life – ” (trans. Aíla de Oliveira miliar portraits and photographs, the bring two international Dickinson scholars to deliver public address- As a member of the EDIS Board, she hopes to continue her efforts to Gomes), “My life closed twice before booklet is dedicated to the memory es throughout Taiwan. bring Dickinson to Asia, to explore connections between Dickinson its close – ” (trans. Manuel Bandeira), of Carlos Daghlian, Brazil’s foremost and Asian artists and poets, expanding the audience of each, and “My River runs to thee – ” (trans. Aíla Dickinson scholar, who died on Sep- Her interests extend to translation as well. She collaborated with to promote cross-cultural conversations on scholarship and trans- de Oliveira Gomes), “You left me – tember 16, 2016, at the age of 78. Stephanie Farrar on translating six of Dickinson’s poems into Chi- lation.

30 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 31 Members’ News Members’News

2018 EDIS Scholarship Awards Hope is the Thing with Numbers By Bill Sweet

Graduate Student Scholarship Dickinson Scholar Award n seeking to learn how our words can be mined to uncover who we Iare, Professor of Statistics Nicholas Horton introduced his students to Emily Dickinson as not just a poet, but the generator of a complex Vivian Delchamps Ryan Heryford data set. ivian Delchamps is an English PhD student at the yan Heryford is an Assistant Professor in the Department of For a recent segment of his course “Data Science,” Horton and his stu- University of California, Los Angeles. Delchamps works V REnglish at California State University, East Bay, where he dents explored Dickinson’s poetry as they would any stream of infor- on nineteenth-century American literature and disability studies, teaches courses in 19th and 20th century American literary and cul- mation, be it linguistic or numerical. medical humanities, and gender studies. Her dissertation will tural studies, with a focus in eco-criticism and the environmental contemplate the literary writings of both doctors and patients in humanities. His current book-length project, “The ‘Snugness of Be- To get a sense of their subject beyond mere words on the page, though, nineteenth-century America. ing’: Nineteenth Century American Literary Vitalisms,” explores the class went to where the poet generated the data: her Amherst home.

the influence of 19th-century environmental and bio-medical phi- On a quiet, snowy morning, students toured the bedroom, parlor, library Project Description losophy on constructions of self and subjectivity within the works and other rooms where Dickinson wrote close to 1,800 poems, and of Poe, Dickinson, and Melville. where she died, largely unpublished, in 1886. In her project, “Emily Dickinson’s Medical Knowledge,” Del- champs surveys a wide range of critics from the late 19th cen- Project Description The purpose of the class is to connect the past with the future, Horton Photograph Credit: Takudzwa Tapfuma tury to today who use Dickinson’s poetry and letters to assign told the students. “To do that in any kind of reasonable way requires a her a medical diagnosis, or who interpret her poems as mere Heryford reconsiders critical debates surrounding Dickinson’s little bit more knowledge than just ‘Here are the poems – start extracting graphics, the course started off with students “scraping” Macbeth and reflections of an underlying illness. Delchamps juxtaposes these lyricism and construction of a lyric “I,” suggesting the existence data from them.’ So that’s why we’re working with the Emily Dickin- Beatles songs, extracting data from the texts. diagnostic readings with Dickinson’s own writings about doc- of alternative pathways in the poet’s configurations of human and son Museum, to let you explore this building where a lot of the writing tors, diagnosis, and medical treatments. Dickinson perceived a non-human personhoods. It is within such spaces of dynamic and was done.” For the Dickinson segment, Horton never knows quite where the stu- connection between medicine and literature, appropriating med- precarious subjectivity, he suggests, that we best find Dickinson’s dents are going to go with the data, he said. Using a web application ical methods in her writings even as she crafted metaphors and politics, implicating her work in national conversations around Use of the museum as a classroom space is nothing unusual, said Eliz- called Shiny, students are basically let loose with Dickinson’s poetry. metonymies that challenged diagnostic claims to truth. By ar- rights and being in the moments leading up to the Civil War, as well abeth Bradley, program coordinator. Just a stone’s throw from campus, Horton started them off by creating a page where, at the click of a but- guing that Dickinson had an intellectual interest in the medical as affording opportunities to resituate Dickinson’s environmental Dickinson’s home has seen visits from over 200 Amherst College stu- ton, the application returns a poem selected at random. practices of her day and was an acute observer of the enigmatic poetry within ongoing conversations around collective ethical com- dents in the past year for private tour groups and on-site classes. The nature of health, Delchamps aims to contribute to the establish- mitments in the face of rapidly changing ecosystems. As the award museum employs about a dozen students as assistants and guides, and “I say, ‘This is my beginning, you can do better than that,’” he said. ment of Dickinson as a significant figure in medical humanities recipient, he plans to further inform this work through visits to the partners with the College for undertakings like a recent exhibit and read- and disability studies. Dickinson archives in Amherst and around New England. ing with the campus literary magazine Circus, she said. Don’t look for dashes in this data set, though. Because of the compli- cated history of the ownership of Dickinson’s poetry, the students are “Data Science” takes students through “practical analyses of large, using the public-domain, early printed versions of the poems, which complex, and messy data sets leveraging modern computing tools,” ac- were shorn of the poet’s idiosyncratic dashes and capitalizations. EDIS Supports Dickinson Scholarship cording to the course description. “Computational data analysis is an essential part of modern statistics and data science.” In past semesters, students have created output such as charts and maps he Emily Dickinson International Society presents the Dickinson Scholar Award and the Graduate Student Scholarship to promote new of the most-used words (Dickinson liked “like,” for instance), or lists of Tresearch on Dickinson. For the Scholar Award, the project need not be devoted solely to Dickinson, but her work should be a substantial “Machine and machine-learning algorithms are now making decisions synonyms and antonyms in the poet’s lexicon. focus. The award of $2,000 may be used for any expense incurred to advance the project. Applicants must have completed the PhD. that affect us profoundly,” said Horton. “How do we train students, ed- ucated citizens, to be able to make sense of that? The course is designed “What I’m really excited about, in teaching statistics at a liberal arts The Graduate Student Scholarship awards $1,000 in support of graduate student scholarship on Dickinson. Again, the project need not be to really get their hands dirty and then periodically have the opportunity college, is the idea of helping students to make sense of the data in the devoted solely to Dickinson, but her work should be a substantial focus. The award may be used for any expense incurred to advance the to come back up and ask the big questions: What does it mean to have world around them,” Horton said. “What could be more of a liberal art project. Preference will be given to applicants in the dissertation stage or writing a work aimed at publication. no privacy in the 21st century? What does it mean to bring these things than that?” together that on their own are pretty innocuous,” but, when you look at Application for the awards involves submission of a cv, a cover letter, a 600-800 word project description, and a brief bibliography. The the big picture, can seem more sinister? This article, slightly modified from a piece by Bill Sweet, first ap- Scholar Award also requires submission of a preliminary budget. Materials should be sent to Michelle Kohler at [email protected]. peared in the “News and Events” pages of the Amherst College Of- Information may be found at www.emilydickinsoninternationalsociety.org and any further questions may be directed to Michelle Kohler. Using Modern Data Science with R, a textbook that Horton co-authored fice of Communications web page. TheBulletin is grateful to Amherst dealing with R, a software environment for statistical computing and College for permission to reprint.

32 | EDIS Bulletin May/June 2018 | 33 Members’News Members’News

EDIS Membership Form

Membership in the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) enables you to participate in the Society’s meetings and conferences, EDIS ANNUAL MEETING 2018 to receive both of the Society’s publications (the Bulletin and the Emily Dickinson Journal), and to help foster the goals of the Society. AMHERST, AUGUST 3-4 Name, title & affiliation ______Mailing address ______Emily Dickinson: In the Company of Others Telephone (home)______(office) ______(fax) ______email ______(Otherness as Company) Please check if this is: new address___ membership renewal ___ n collaboration with the Em- Membership Categories and Rates: ily Dickinson Museum, the Joint EDIS-ED Museum _____$110 I 2018 Annual Meeting will be Regular _____ $60 Student _____ $30 held Aug. 3-4 in Amherst. “Em- Associate (receives only the Bulletin) _____ $20 ily Dickinson: In the Company Institutional _____$125 of Others (Otherness as Com- pany)” will feature a keynote Contributions (added to membership fee) address by Vivian Pollak, Pro- Sustaining Member $_____($150 or more) fessor of English at the Univer- Contributing Member $_____($50 – $149) sity of Washington, St. Louis General Contribution $_____ and one of the original founders Scholar Travel / EDIS Institute $_____ of the Society. Pollak is the au- thor of Dickinson: The Anxiety Total Amount Enclosed $_____ Photo Credit: Sean Garcia of Gender (1986) and most recent- Gift Memberships ly, Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference Name, title & affiliation ______(2016), nominated for the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize. Mailing address ______In addition to the prestigious EDIS Critical Institute and an open Research Circle, the ______meeting will feature panels on Dickinson and pedagogy, addressing Dickinson and oth- Telephone (home)______(office) ______(fax) ______ers, Dickinson in secondary education, and embodied Dickinson. There will be reading email ______seminars on Dickinson, race and gender; and poetry groups on Dickinson’s reading cultures and her notions of solitude and community. Use additional page for further gift memberships. Please make check or money order payable, in U.S. dollars, to Special events at this year’s meeting will feature a lecture by the celebrated composer, Johns Hopkins University Press Journals Publishing Division conductor and teacher, Alice Parker (featured in the Spring 2015 issue of the Bulle- P.O. Box 19966 tin) and an original performance about Dickinson’s life and work by Laurie McCants, Baltimore, MD 21211-0966 called Industrious Angels (featured in the Fall 2017 issue). Friday evening there will be www.emilydickinsoninternationalsociety.org a Concert Reading of poems and letters organized by Barbara Dana, and performed by Dana with actors Amelia Campbell and Elizabeth Morton, and scholars Christopher TEL: 800/548-1784; FAX: 410/516-3866 Benfey and Cindy MacKenzie. FED ID #: V52-0595110/Canadian GST #: 124004946RT There will also be literary walks and tours of Dickinson and Todd sites in Amherst; a presentation in the Amherst College Archives; and a picnic on the grounds of the Dick- inson Homestead with a view of the Pelham Hills.

A full program for the Annual Meeting appears on the EDIS webpage.

Members are invited to endow a named award. To do so involves a gift of $1000 to the Society. Above, Vivian Pollak; above opposite, Alice Parker conducting; below opposite, Laurie McCants during a solo performance. Photo Credit: Nathaniel Allen

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