books

I was playing with Tweefind this morning, a Twitter search application that tries to apply a sort of ranking algorithm to “tweets,” and came across this page of reviews of Dickinson’s Selected Letters.

I wasn’t sure what to make of recommendations like “[a]s fascinating to the uranologist person as they are to the unplanned enthusiast, Dickinson’s letters — along with those of uranologist or histrion — establish that this is every taste as lawful a music as falsity or poetry.” Or, “Emily poet was a enthusiastic honor writer, in every senses of the word. In fact digit gets the notion that she actually desirable composition to people, than gathering and conversing with them, and for her the action of a honor was a enthusiastic event.” Though I did like this, which appears to be a translation from English to German and back to English, with a little help from Shel Sliverstein and Lewis Carroll:

“Father does not springy with us today — he lives in a newborn house. Though it was shapely in an distance it is meliorate than this. He hasn’t whatever garden because he touched after gardens were made, so we verify him the prizewinning flowers, and if we exclusive knew he knew, perhaps we could kibosh crying.”

I’m guessing there’s some odd API “magic” going on with items on the back list; other reviews on Wropl are less mangled. It appears that book reviews are being culled from Amazon’s international sites, and rendered into that special sort of prose that machines excel at composing.

Worry not, gentle reader; no such mangling goes on here at Daily Dickinson. The books that you see in the side bar and in the Daily Dickinson Amazon Store have been hand-picked specifically for the Dickinson aficionado. We’ve included collections of Dickinson poems, biographies, and critical studies; works of history and philosophy related to themes in Dickinson’s poetry; and works by other poets (like Rae Armantrout and Billy Collins) we think you’ll like.

No odd API calls, no keyword guessing, no “looking nervy to with stabbing anticipation,” just selections for the discriminating reader of poetry. Purchases help to keep the Daily Dickinson project sputtering along.

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The Poetry Foundation podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf, has recently re-broadcast a piece about Rae Armantrout, “More Than Meets the I,” whom Ange Milenko calls “the scariest poet since Emily Dickinson.”

Readers who are drawn in by Dickinson’s gnomic, witty, sharp verse would be well-advised to try Armantrout. Like Dickinson, she takes on big topics–the nature of the self, the meaning of love and pity, the way language works or doesn’t–in brief, clever poems that pack much into a short space. Her poems are short, but by no means easy; they’re puzzling, sometimes inscrutable, and haunting.

The thrust of Milenko’s piece is that Armantrout stands apart from most contemporary American poets by her use (or, more often than not, non-use) of “I.” She’s not a confessional poet; we don’t learn anything significant about her private life from her poems, much the way Dickinson’s private life is veiled (and made that much more open to overwrought speculation for its invisibility). Instead, she offers a cool and detached “I,” an observer and commentator but not a participant.

It’s this detachment that makes her scary, in the way Dickinson can be scary. Armantrout doesn’t offer just pithy observations; she offers riddles about important things told in a seemingly off-handed manner. But she doesn’t offer answers to those riddles.

You can read more Armantrout at the Poetry Foundation site, or dip into some of her books:

• Next Life (Wesleyan Poetry)
• Versed (Wesleyan Poetry)
• Up to Speed (Wesleyan Poetry)
• Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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Acacia Theatre Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will perform the world-premier production of Chris Cagan’s “Emily,” a play that tells the story of Emily Dickinson’s life, backwards. The play starts on Easter Sunday, 1860, when Dickinson was 29, and works back to 1848, when she was 17, tracing the origins of her disenchantment with religion and her growing seclusion from the outside world.

“The play begins with the end result – Emily’s seclusion – and works backward to a time when she was more social,” said Director Dr. David W. Eggebrecht. “It’s an interesting perspective, knowing what’s going to happen. It gives you insights into why she became the reclusive poet that she became. The traumas that occurred in her life accentuated her eccentricities and led her to become much more introspective.”

The playwright’s website has an excerpt from the play (in Microsoft Word format), a tense family dinner scene. Dickinson’s poetry is woven throughout, the play adding context to the verse while the poetry illuminates the domestic drama.

Readings of “Emily” have been performed at the Pacific Theatre in Vancouver and at the Drama Bookshop in New York City. Acacia’s performance will be its first full staging.

Performances will be given at 8 p.m. on Feb. 27, 8 p.m. on Feb. 28, 3 p.m. on March 1, 8 p.m. on March 5, 8 p.m. on March 6, 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. on March 7 and 3 p.m. on March 8.

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On January 12, 2009, the words of Emily Dickinson will return to the London Underground. Not, though, as part of the Poems on the Underground series, which has featured Much madness is divinest sense, I taste a liquor never brewed, and There came a Wind like a Bugle in the past.

Instead, two lines from Dickinson will be part of the British Humanist Association’s Atheist Bus campaign:

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we don’t believe
Does not exhilarate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate –
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

The campaign on the Underground will also feature Douglas Adams, Albert Einstein, and Katherine Hepburn. The choice–of Dickinson in general, and these words in particular–is thought-provoking.

Dickinson was certainly a skeptic. Though she lived in a world charged with religious and spiritual fervor–the last waves of the Second Great Awakening, Calvinist pietism, Emersonian Transcendentalism–she paddled against the general stream. Though she attended the Mount Holyoke Seminary, Dickinson never “converted” like so many of her peers. “Christ is calling everyone here,” she wrote in an 1850 letter, “all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion.”

But an atheist? I’m not entirely convinced. Dickinson’s approach to religion was certainly ironic, skeptical, sometimes sacrilegious, often playful. In her poems about death in particular, she strikes some pretty hard blows against religious beliefs. Safe in their alabaster chambers, for example, notes the eternal sleep of the “meek members of the resurrection” while “[g]rand go the years in the crescent above them”; Death, for Dickinson, is a particular Eternity, with no sounding trumpet on Judgment Day.

But God–or a god of some sort–is strongly present in many of her poems. In some cases, it seems to be a Calvinist God–remote, unknowable, harsh. In other cases, as in her poems about the loss of loved ones, there seems to be a consoling God:

They perished in the seamless grass, –
No eye could find the place;
But God on his repealless list
Can summon every face.

More often, “God” seems to be a metaphor for something–universal order, the grandeur of nature, time–larger than the individual. There’s much vastness in these short poems, and much wonder. Dickinson certainly rejects the trappings of church and piety, and is at the very least unorthodox, heretical, and strongly critical of religion. But she is very much of her time and place all the same, and not easily made to fit into contemporary atheist or humanist garb. If anything, she reminds me most of the Nontheist Friends, a particularly slippery sort of Quaker.

That the Atheist Bus campaign picked this particular Dickinson poem, and these specific lines, is interesting. It’s certainly an aphoristic statement, and it echoes the “stop worrying and enjoy your life” catchphrase of the campaign. But the second two lines–”Believing what we don’t believe / Does not exhilarate”–seems more consistent with Dickinson’s poetry, and, to be honest, much less trite; I could almost picture “That it will never come again / Is what makes life so sweet” printed on the pedestal of a “Precious Moments” figurine. There are better, more searing quotes available–her poem on the inefficacy of prayer, for example, or her playful mocking of a Heavenly afterlife:

I ‘m glad I don’t believe it,
For it would stop my breath,
And I ‘d like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.

We need to be careful when marshaling the dead to our contemporary causes, particularly the subtle dead like Dickinson. Her concerns were not necessarily ours, and her approach to doubt and faith much more nuanced than what we hear now on either side of the debate. I don’t know that she’d be bothered to be on the Atheist Bus posters–she’d probably find it more than a little funny–but her smile would be more than a touch wry.

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Book artist Charles Hobson interpreted Billy Collins’ “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” in a wonderfully inventive way; reading this book requires one to deal with mother-of-pearl buttons with a “light forward pull” and contend with the “hook-and-eye fastener” to get to the pages between the covers.

While you’re visiting Hobson’s site, be sure to look at the other interpretations he offers: of stories and essays by Barry Lopez, poems by Richard Wilbur and Margaret Atwood, paintings and monotypes by Edgar Degas, and Balzac’s thoughts on coffee. They are rich and tactile expressions that merge words and print and paper and images in fascinating ways.

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A few Dickinson news items have drawn our attention, and might warrant yours:

• Guy Noir sings Emily Dickinson?: the Amherst Bulletin notes that Emily Dickinson was the butt of an extended joke on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion last week, with the erstwhile P.I. Guy Noir auditioning for a role in “Stop for Death,” a Dickinson musical. Of course, this is the same Keillor whose latest CD is called “English Majors” and who holds sonnet contests, so I’m sure the joke was in good fun (Cub Scout activities kept me from hearing the show myself, alas). I seem to remember an amusing riff a few months ago that involved Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and wood ticks; Keillor is certainly one to monitor . . .
• Dickinson Marathon in St. Paul: another story with a Minnesota connection: St. Thomas University will hold a Dickinson marathon on April 25, 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, in the O’Shaughnessy Room of O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center. “The goal: To read aloud all of Dickinson’s poems — from #1 to #1,789 — between 8 a.m. and midnight. Readers can come and go as they please; stay for a half-hour or make a day of it. Participants will sit in a circle and take turns reading; listeners are welcome too.” Common Good Books–Garrison Keillor’s bookstore–has provided copies of Franklin’s edition of Dickinson; this seems like a conspiracy . . .
• Wild Nights! reviews are all around us this Spring: the Minneapolis Star Tribune weighs in (will these Minnesotans not leave poor Dickinson be?), as does the New York Times Book Review. According to the Book Review’s podcast, the NYT reviewer Brenda Wineapple has a book about Dickinson and Higginson hitting the shelves this August.
• A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey is the next Dickinson-related book to watch: a fascinating look into the intersections of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Martin Johnson Heade, a naturalist and artist who specialized in hummingbirds, a creature which frequently inhabits Dickinson’s poems.
• Fleda Brown discusses “I heard a fly buzz” in her ongoing series for National Poetry Month (and you thought April was just about fools and taxes . . .)
• Finally, we hope that the “Daily” aspect of “Daily Dickinson” will return this week, with several non-poetic things coming under control here at DailyDickionson World Headquarters; stay tuned!

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I am glad there are Books. They are better than Heaven, for that is unavoidable, while one may miss these.

– Emily Dickinson to Frank Sanborn, 1873

The Emily Dickinson Museum has started on an ambitious and interesting project: to restore the Dickinson homes’ libraries to their condition when Emily was in residence.

Most of the books that were in the Dickinson homes–both the Homestead, where Emily lived, and the Evergreens, her brother Austin’s home–are at Harvard or Brown. Though a boon to scholars–knowing what a poet was reading can be very helpful in understanding what she was writing, especially if there are scribbles in the margins–this makes the shelves at the Dickinson homes much barer than they should be.

The Dickinson Museum is looking for in-kind and cash donations to fill the shelves; each book’s donor will be named on a book plate in the volume placed on the shelf. They have a list, but it hasn’t been updated on the web site since January 9, 2008; if you’re interested in contributing in-kind (and by “in-kind”, they mean the exact edition: not just any Jane Eyre, but the 1864 Harper’s & Bros. with the Currer Bell pseudonym), check with the folks on the Replenishing the Shelves project before you send anything.

Cash, no doubt, is a much preferred and flexible contribution.

He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

A BOOK

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, poet and visual artist Irene Koronas has released a book, “self portrait drawn from many,” consisting of portraits (in words and pictures) of people ranging from Arthur Rimbaud to Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Chaplin to Emily Dickinson. Subtitled “65 poems for 65 years”, the poems offer both insight into their subjects and, collectively, a portrait of a life of reading, writing, and thinking.

The Ibbetson Street Press publication is available at Lulu; a Koronas piece on Emily Dickinson also appears in the online journal Istanbul Literary Review. Interviews from the Boston Globe and Cervena Barva Press offer more insight.

Koronas is also the poetry editor of Wilderness House Literary Review, a quarterly online journal. There are so many wonderful online journals springing up–my own favorites include The Barcelona Review, failbetter, and JMWW–that it’s hard to keep up; WHL is certainly worth a look.

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