Class notes5

These poems can cause us to consider the mutability — and ultimately the adaptability — of a
metrical structure we might have assumed was stable. (It has often been noted how metrically
“scannable” many of Dickinson’s letters can be, thus potentially troubling the distinction
between poetry and prose.) This point is well taken and can inspire interesting thoughts about
the liberation of meter from line. In other poems, however, it is not always clear what we
should gain from the facsimile reproduction, or why it’s necessarily preferable to reading a
print version. In most cases, as described above, expediency is not the collection’s selling
point.

So after some moments of pleasure and epiphany, the question becomes one of emphasis:
what do we as readers want to take away from poetry? For many Dickinson manuscript
scholars today, the interest is not so much in the disseminable or printable poem itself — that
is, its repeatability in our voices, books, and lives — but in the way it adapted itself to the
material constraints that may or may not have governed its having been physically written in
the first place. In this view, the poem is a product of its immediate writerly environment.
According to Susan Howe, who wrote the preface to The Gorgeous Nothings, Dickinson’s
poems are “visual productions” that we cannot understand without seeing them in the settings
of their original, handwritten forms. (According to Bervin, it was this directive that guided the
production of the Gorgeous Nothings edition; to be sure, it seems to have inspired Werner’s
later description of the envelope-writings as collages, birds, and holographs.) For Bervin and
Werner, the collected poems of Emily Dickinson straddle the limits, and fray the boundaries,
between poetry and visual art.

These claims don’t convince me, though, since Dickinson’s medium is never the painterly
image (what Plato called the “natural sign”), but instead always the alphabet, or the so-called
artificial sign, regardless of the poet’s chosen writing implements or manner of paper. I’m
also too committed to the age-old genre of lyric poetry — and to Dickinson’s participation in
it — not to think that calling these works “visual productions” effectively squelches or even
silences their aural qualities.

Still, I’m sure to be in the minority here among both scholars and poets. Howe has influenced
a generation of manuscript scholars who see the idiosyncrasy of Dickinson’s handwriting,
scraps, and fascicle production as integral to the way we should read her. And such concern
with poetry’s “means of production” is admittedly timely. It’s in line with the concerns of at
least two strands of poets writing in the present day: the metonymic bent of Language poets
(with whom Howe has been a strange, if enduring, bedfellow), and poets writing “born
digital,” or hypertext, works. In these ways, Dickinson’s gorgeous envelopes underline the
power of writers’ physical or technological constraints — and suggest that the limits of our
material technologies, whether electronic or flimsy as an old wrapper, can play as large a role
in creative production as the more traditionally “formal” or aesthetic demands of, say, meter
itself. (Probably the best twentieth-century version of what I’m talking about is the adding
machine tape on which A.R. Ammons typed Tape for the Turn of the Year.)

Like poetry, scholarship probably works best when its time is of the essence. It has
traditionally been easy — and, of course, inaccurate — to stereotype Dickinson as a recluse
and loner. Today, Dickinson manuscript scholars may be overcompensating for their
predecessors’ mistakes by overemphasizing the social, or epistolary, qualities of  her work.
And by drawing our attention to these envelope scraps — rather than, for example, to
Dickinson’s carefully threaded, arranged, and hidden fascicles — some scholars want us to
associate Dickinson with the ephemeral and the fragmentary: with the veneer, at least, of the
aleatory or unfinished. (In a nod to “archive fever,” paper mail delivery is itself going the way
of ephemera as I write — it is now almost a thing of the past.)

The delectable appeal of The Gorgeous Nothings will be obvious to poets: Dickinson’s
fragments are visually exquisite, and Werner is the rare literary critic whose writing is
beautiful and lyrical enough to be a prose poem of its own. The dangers of the production, in
contrast, are much more oblique — and ultimately twofold, in my view. One is that, just as
Dickinson’s first editors co-opted her work into a “sentimental” role that didn’t fit, now the
“unfinished” aspects of the envelope poems may come to characterize her entire output.
(Arguably, this has already happened.) This critical tack sways Dickinson towards
experimental rather than lyric aesthetics. And when she’s “socialized” in the epistolary
manner, the great poet becomes more stereotypically feminized and more domesticated than
the content of   her most important work warrants.

You may well ask why contemporary poets should care about these debates at all. The
question of how to read and interpret Emily Dickinson may seem an antique, scholarly
wrinkle that has no real relevance for contemporary artists. Yet Dickinson continues to be
among the most indelible of influences in American poetry. We couldn’t get rid of her if we
tried, and no one seems to want to try very hard to begin with. It’s difficult to imagine May
Swenson, Jean Valentine, Lucie Brock-Broido, A.R. Ammons, Kay Ryan, and any number of
poets without having had Dickinson’s work first. At this moment, I’m also remembering a
poet who, for a while, used Dickinson’s famous portrait as an emblem on his personal
stationery. How many others of us superimpose her diction or syntax on our own?

Dickinson is clearly alive and well and still being worked out. But the question remains:
which Dickinson are we working on? Which one are we fantasizing about? The Howe / 
Werner / Bervin model is undeniably attractive. She’s also the one that is in fashion this
season. Given her increasing power, how might we keep the other Emily Dickinsons
conceptually — and meaningfully — in play?