winter

Jeanette Winterson (herself a bit of a celebrity) writes in the Times Online of the conflict between celebrity and creativity. She imagines an “American Idol”-style competition for young writers, and suggests that the successful competitor “should be good-looking, funny, talkative, personable, the right shape for an Armani suit, and a bit of a psychopath.”

Some writers would probably have thrived in this setting; Winterson suggests that Byron, Dickens, and Gertrude Stein would have found something to like in the arrangement (and I’d add Twain, I think, and probably Emerson). Others, like Wordsworth, “would have had a nervous breakdown or gone to join D.H.Lawrence in Mexico.” As ever, Dickinson is mentioned in passing as the shorthand example for shyness.

But there’s quite a bit more to Dickinson’s relationship to fame (or, as it has devolved over the last 121 years since her death, mere notoriety) than simple shyness. It wasn’t that she feared attention or hid from the world; fame was a game that she chose not to play. In I’m nobody, she used her deft humor to mock those who are driven by fame:

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog

There’s a “Don’t give up!” list circulating around the blogosphere (you can see it here, here, and here, for example) that includes the observation that “Emily Dickinson had only seven poems published in her lifetime.” What this list fails to note, of course, is that publishing her poems seems not to have been a very high priority for Dickinson; it was the writing of them, not the publishing of them, that mattered. She was none too keen on having them see the light of day. Rather than a model for the unpublished writer striving to break into print, Dickinson is an example of the amateur who does what she loves for no reward but joy. How dreadfully out of step!

It’s fascinating to watch artists respond to Dickinson’s work: playwrights, choreographers, letterpress artisans, visual artists, and yurt builders have used Dickinson’s poems as a springboard for their own creativity. Now through November 29, the AIA Gallery in Baltimore presents architectural renderings by Don Cook that use Dickinson’s poems as their foundation (quite literally). According to Deborah McLeod’s review in the Baltimore City Paper, Cook explains:

“Using [Dickinson's] syllabic grid as a floor plan, I assigned upright, load bearing values to the rhyme, alliteration and refrain patterns–and was startled to discover that, from an architectural standpoint, many of her poems were able to support a roof . . . the sketches that grew out of this investigation suggested a High Modernist glass box.”

The sketches are certainly more reminiscent of the Mies van der Rohe house in Barcelona than the Homestead or Evergreens in Amherst. But their clean lines and careful structure draw attention to the architecture inherent in Dickinson’s poems; like the short, spare lines of her verse, Cook’s imaginary houses have not an extra pane or beam to distract from the structure.

You can read more about this work at BmoreArt and Urbanite. And if you’re interested in having one of these poems built, Cook says that he is “interested in the opportunity of building full-scale pavilions based on these translations.”

There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
‘ T is the seal, despair, –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.

‘T WAS later when the summer went
Than when the cricket came,
And yet we knew that gentle clock
Meant nought but going home.

‘T was sooner when the cricket went
Than when the winter came,
Yet that pathetic pendulum
Keeps esoteric time.

William Coperthwaite’s A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity uses some Emily Dickinson poems, as well as a touch of Thoreau and Emerson and D. H. Lawrence, to help celebrate a close-to-the-earth life. Mr. Coperthwaite lives in a yurt (a nomadic shelter native to the Mongolian steppes) on the north coast of Maine: a level of “simplicity” that borders on “brutal” and “masochistic”. (I live in Minnesota, where we have some pretty impressive winters, and my roots are in Maine, where backwoods antics are often practiced, and the thought of living through a northern winter in a yurt strikes me as equally inspirational and terrifying.)

I’m not sure that Emily Dickinson would have given up her Amherst home for a yurt, even in the summer, but I can imagine her paying Mr. Coperthwaite a visit. Perhaps with an ample serving of her black cake and some of the brandy that she no doubt reserved from the recipe: 8 pounds of dried fruit might not get you through the winter, but with a pint of brandy it might manage February…

Robin Powell uses Dickinson’s “There’s a certain slant of light” to lead into an interesting discussion of what we in the northern hemisphere call “winter interest” in the garden. (Yes, it’s winter now in the southern hemisphere; note the Calvino-inspired title of a review from The Age mentioned here a couple weeks ago.)

What makes this discussion especially interesting is that its focus is on the shadows cast by plants, especially deciduous trees:

The best shadow patterns from a deciduous tree are cast on a solid coloured surface. A rendered wall is ideal, light-coloured paving or gravel are also good. In summer, lawn is a wonderful canvas for the shifting shadows of lacy trees, but in winter there’s not as much sparkle in the sunlight and the effect is not the same.

As a master gardener in the northern part of the temperate zone, Ms. Dickinson no doubt was quite aware of the “winter interest” of garden plants. Her observations on the quality of winter light is certainly apt. I’m not a gardener myself–I’ve got a small yard and two small boys, so my garden consists of a lush pumpkin patch and not much else–but the garden in winter fascinates me. In particular, I love to walk through the Dowling Community Garden near the boys’ school and marvel at the bent seed heads and the promise of warmth under the Minnesota snow. This coming winter (which, this being Minnesota, could arrive as early as September…), I’ll be watching for shadows as well.

Two more Dickinson-related books are mentioned in recent reviews:

Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Brontë, by Maureen Adams

Emily Dickinson’s Newfoundland dog Carlo is covered in this book, along with Woolf’s Plinka, Brontë’s mastiff Keeper, and the canine companions of other late-19th century women writers. Says Jackie Crosby’s Star Tribune review,

Psychologist and former English professor Maureen Adams weaves a brilliant narrative using diaries, letters and published works to tell the largely untold story of how dogs comforted, healed and even sparked amorous adventures with five of the world’s most enduring writers.

The Dickinson Papers by Mark Ragg

A hunt for purloined Dickinson letters draws together a poetry lover and a museum curator in contemporary Sydney. (This book is, alas, currently available only to Australian readers.) Says Emily Maguire in a note in The Age:

Packed with poetry, literary anecdotes, musings on the proper placement of books, yarns about Sydney’s underworld and Samuel Beckett’s cricketing style, and a hundred other diversions, it all comes together nicely thanks to smart writing, a super-light comical touch and characters as real and memorable as any I’ve come across in recent fiction

As an aside: I find it frustrating that the English-speaking world is so splintered when it comes to book publishing. Radio National’s Book Show is a significant part of my podcast-listening diet, and numerous times I’ve heard a fascinating interview or glowing review and upon rushing to Powell’s or Amazon to add the book to my wish list, I discover that it’s not available in the States yet and isn’t likely to be any time soon. It’s bad enough that there are so many great books that are never translated into English, as The Literary Saloon reminds us almost daily; that we can’t easily share books across the countries that ostensibly speak the same language, is a cruel anachronism in this age of the borderless Internet.

Glee! The great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

Ring, for the scant salvation!
Toll, for the bonnie souls, –
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
And only the waves reply.

I love the way the last stanza undercuts the thunderous joy of the first two. The uncomfortable silence after the children ask their difficult but obvious question is palpable; the waves beating against the shore–the waves that know all too well what became of the forty–make the silence that much darker.

This photo is available as a greeting card.