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Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 71
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Friday, February 26, 2010 - 02:55 pm: | 
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EMILY IN VARIOUS (SKELETON) KEYS
DICKINSON
“I...took rainbows, as the common say” (257)
Success is counted sweetest
At home,
By those who ne’er succeed.
safe
To comprehend a nectar
in her father’s house,
Requires sorest need.
she saw
Not one of all the purple Host
carnage.
Who took the Flag today
She who
Can tell the definition
wouldn’t venture
So clear of Victory
beyond her father’s
As he defeated—dying—
house
On whose forbidden ear
she, in a world
The distant strains of triumph
of women,
Burst agonized and clear!
wore the white
Good Night! Which put the Candle out?
flag
A jealous Zephyr—not a doubt—
of defeat,
Ah, friend, you little knew
marriage,
How long at that celestial wick
and godly innocence
The Angels—labored diligent—
O Angel
Extinguished—now—for you!
O inexhaustible, sexual riddle
It might—have been the Light House spark—
O seductress
Some Sailor—rowing in the Dark—
of light
Had importuned to see!
&
It might—have been the waning lamp
dark
That lit the Drummer from the Camp
Furious artificer!
To purer Reveille!
God appears—is absent—dies—
*
EMILY, WITH WHITE MOURNING
I cross these grounds
to no one’s home
no one’s home
in my love tomb
no one and I
converse, confer
with whippoorwill
and juniper
with dust and light
and wisp o’ wind
with all except
frail humankind
frail humankind
may visit us
but to converse
looms dangerous
[Note: Thomas Wentworth Higginson corresponded with Dickinson from 1862 until her death in 1886. When in 1868 he urged her to come to Boston so that they could formally meet for the first time, she declined, writing: “Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad, but I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town.” After meeting her, Higginson wrote, “Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.” In 1867 she had begun to converse with visitors from the other side of a door rather than speaking with them face to face. During her last fifteen years, few of the people who exchanged messages with her ever saw her in person. Many of Walt Whitman’s poems are intense expressions of the physical absence of the reader—as opposed to the “listener”—and of Whitman’s desire to cross over that absence, endemic to writing. One wonders whether Dickinson’s eccentric behavior had something to do with the same perception: “I’m nobody!...Are you nobody too?” ]
*
THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT:
Emil Dickinson. Born in Amherst, Mass, and sporting (it is said) “auburn hair,” he “was definitely a strange one,” remarked contemporaries. After attending Harvard, where he was reportedly an outgoing and raucous lad, eventually Emil boarded himself up in his room on the top floor of the family manse remarking, “I am not going to let them get me. I am going to sit in this stupid room and write verses. If anyone comes to visit, I plan to stand in a near-by room and shout my answers to their casual remarks or else pass by outside the window and send them notes. I will also sew my verses into fascicles. Do you know what fascicles are? Hah, I thought not. But you will find out once I die and become famous, both of which I plan to do.” Emil’s sister Lavinia remarked, “With a brother like that, how can anyone expect to have an active and interesting social life? Oh, brother.” But Emil just smiled and bided his time. Someone dubbed him “The man in the white suit” when they caught a glimpse of him passing in the window. He went on writing his “complex and open-ended poems which do not encourage closure and which question all gender and familial relationships” until he died. It was then that Lavinia discovered his four thousand, three hundred and seventy five individual verses (many with variants) and resolved to display them to the world so that everyone would recognize her brother’s genius. No one, however, was interested, not a single publisher wanted them. One wrote back: “These verses are too weird and puerile even for us. Send us something when you grow up.” Emil’s tombstone (now overgrown with leaves of grass) bears the inscription: EMIL DICKINSON FLOP.
ONE OF EMIL’S VERSES
(fascicle 4,267)
I saw a pie bake—when I died
It smelled to me like apple—
O what a way to go—said I
No Angel here—to grope me—
I’m comfy in my little room
I’m comfy in the family tomb
I die—I fa’ down and go boom—
May G-d Almighty help me—
Unless of course He—has too much
Upon His—Mind—to note—me
*
EMILY
The woman in white
The woman in white
Watches from the window
Watches from the window
“I cross my father’s ground
“I cross my father’s ground
To no man’s house or town”
“To no man’s house or town”
In the next room
In the next room
Friends gather
Friends gather
To whom she will not speak
To whom she will not speak
Except by shouting
Except by shouting
From another room
From another room
She is a “secretary”
She is a “secretary”
(In which the word “secret” appears)
(In which the word “secret” appears)
To her own consciousness
To her own consciousness
Death
Death
Lives
Lives
In the room she shares
In the room she shares
With no one but the world
Called back
Emily |
Jack Foley
New member
Username: Foley
Post Number: 73
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, March 04, 2010 - 09:51 am: |
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From “Emily Dickinson and Class”
by Domhnall Mitchell:
This is both the fate and gift of literature: to generate meanings across boundaries of time and space, class, and colour--and beyond even the control of the consciousness from which it originally emerged. "Nature," Dickinson once wrote, "is a Haunted House--but Art--a House that tries to be haunted." Literature is a site about which there are competing or successive claims of ownership (those of author, performer, reader, scholar), and any composition set down on paper allows the possibility of perspectives that differ in emphasis from one's own. The spectres at the margins of Dickinson's pages include the readers of the present: we are somewhere between squatters, illegally occupying property at the time of its owner's absence, and tenants with fuller rights of residency. There is no need to overlook flaws, but over time we can learn to live with them, and to admire aspects of the view and the magnificent architecture of surmise.
The entire essay--a fascinating piece--is available in The Oxford Companion to Emily Dickinson, edited by Wendy Martin. |
Melanie L Huber
New member
Username: Melanie_l_huber
Post Number: 178
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, March 04, 2010 - 01:04 pm: |
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Wonderful information about Emily Jack, thanks...I esp like that quote about nature being a haunted house and art being a house that tries to be haunted...I've not read the essay, I'll look for it, sounds interesting. |
Mary-Marcia Casoly
New member
Username: Casoly
Post Number: 8
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Thursday, March 04, 2010 - 09:09 pm: |
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Wonderful excerpt from the essay. I haunt and hunt the pages of my own writing as well as those of others. Sometimes reading it can feel as if a ghost sits beside you. Sometimes it can feel like looking in on an old house before demolition. Which reminds me now of a house party where all the guests were able to write, carve, break off, carry away parts of fixtures, photograph, and act out in various ways (as in a couple that slept inside the fire place). By the break of morning, it was over and the house was bulldozed and razed the next day, nothing but the pieces were left and the memory. For any one of us which are the pieces that bring back which gifts, what fate? |
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