The Auction of the Mind: on Emily Dickinson

(this review originally appeared in Harvard Review Online).

 

Emily Dickinson’s poetry explores the relationship between the temporal world and the infinite. As Wallace Stevens examines the tensions and negotiations between imagination and reality, so Dickinson teases out the ways in which the ineffable presses upon the mortal and ephemeral. Stevens notes that the pressure of reality on the imagination varies with circumstance (wartime, for example), but for Dickinson the pressure of the infinite on mortality is constant and compelling:

For Death – or rather

For the Things ‘twould buy –

This – put away

Life’s Opportunity –

The things that Death will buy

Are Room –

Escape from Circumstances –

And a Name –

With Gifts of Life

How Death’s Gifts may compare –

We know not –

For the Rates – lie Here –

                                                                                   (325; Franklin 644)

Death and life, in her world, overlap and compete, although death always has some advantage: since it leads to eternity it is permanent. Keeping this binary opposition in mind clarifies our reading of her work, which is sometimes oblique and idiosyncratic. Her characteristic hymn-like rhythms and structures enable an unmatched range of aesthetic tactics, and her wide array of topics impresses, but her primary focus on the stress and strain of the immortal pushing upon the mortal runs like a live wire through all of her work. This essentially religious concern does not explain her reluctance to present her work to the world at large. Nor does it resolve the apparent contradiction between her unwillingness to publish and her care in preserving the bulk of her poetry. One might expect a poet concerned with the most major of human issues to offer her poems to a larger audience than the handful of relatives and friends who read her work in her lifetime (only ten poems appeared in print while she lived, some more than once but none with her approval). Despite oddities of punctuation, diction, rhyme and rhythm, her cumulative achievement surprised Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her first editors. No one, not even her sister Lavinia, had foreseen such a large and powerful body of work. Higginson in the 1860s had judged her poems too eccentric for publication; but after her death, when he saw how much she had accomplished, he realized how seriously he had erred, and used his full influence to promote her work. The enthusiastic public response since her first book appeared in 1890, four years after her death, has never abated.

About a dozen collections, most of them edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Emily’s niece) or Millicent Todd Bingham (Mabel’s daughter), followed that first book. All early editions revised her poetry to conform to ordinary conventions of punctuation and often to correct her wayward rhythms and rhymes. They frequently added titles, which Dickinson had usually avoided. All editors selected from the whole (or at least the available) range of her work until Thomas Johnson published his comprehensive three-volume variorum edition in 1955. Johnson arranged the poems chronologically, depending partly on his understanding of the evolution of Dickinson’s holograph over the years of her writing career. He honored her eccentricities, including her reliance on dashes, her resistance to titles, her sometimes challenging sense of rhythm, and her off-rhymes. In 1998 R.W. Franklin produced a heavily revised variorum edition, also nominally chronological. But well before that, in 1981, he complicated the textual issues by publishing a two-volume facsimile edition of Dickinson’s forty “fascicles,” small thread-bound compilations of poems.

These fascicles may not always include only poems from a narrow time period (although Franklin seems confident that, for the most part, they do), and therefore may challenge the assumed chronology. To complicate things, Dickinson, after the first eight fascicles, includes alternate words and phrasing for many of the poems, so we cannot be sure that she considered even this orderly presentation to be close to final. Although Franklin arranged the fascicles chronologically by holograph, Dickinson usually discarded her worksheets when she transcribed her poems into her little folders, so a given poem may have been composed years before she copied it. Hers is a complex compositional process. We might wonder if one reason Dickinson chose not to publish, aside from her argument that “Publication -- is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man—”, is that she never actually finished any of her poems.

In 1986 I published in ESQ an essay arguing that at least some of the fascicles were linked by common themes, subjects, or motifs. Many scholarly essays and several books have since delved into the fascicles, exploring Dickinson’s selection and arrangement and offering various theses about the intention and accomplishment of these tiny books. While this has been in many ways a fruitful discussion, I no longer believe that theme, topic, or motif are germane. If, as I now argue, all of her poems, regardless of their superficial subject, engage the meta-subject of temporality and infinity and expend themselves revealing the interstices, tensions, and mutual pressures of those concepts, then any arrangement or juxtaposition will amplify that basic concern.

Still, the issue of presentation haunts the Dickinson world. Should the presumptive chronology and almost imperceptible development of her precocious style shape our reading, as Johnson and Franklin’s variorums suggest? Has tracing her work chronologically, through heroic textual editing, helped us understand her complex and oblique art? I don’t think that so far it has. If chronology hasn’t helped, should we then read her gatherings as determined sequences, or as a psychologically acceptable substitution for the publication she claimed to detest? Are the little poem-packets working toward finished products, or would she have arranged her poems in yet another form for actual publication? Did she hope that her small established audience, particularly her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson (to whom she sent some 250 poems), would find and read these packets? Can such considerations shape our critical readings in useful ways? Numerous Dickinson scholars have gnawed at these questions without arriving at a general consensus.

And then, in 2013, just when we thought Dickinson’s textual adventures had peaked, a coffee-table book entitled Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings appeared. This facsimile edition presents scraps of writing—scrawls on envelopes, shreds with three or four words on them, and small draft pages, all carefully related to finished poems or known letters and handsomely reproduced full-sized in color—and poses yet more tenuous theses and gravid questions. Although the editor insists that Dickinson’s is a visual art and finds the significance of these tatters in the poet’s sensitivity to space and layout, and although Susan Howe provides a brief, compelling[O1] , and suggestive if factually challenged preface, it’s not yet clear that this beautiful book has added much to the discussion. Like some other recent critical work, it challenges but does not disprove Franklin’s assertion that “a literary work is separable from its artifact.” That doesn’t mean this edition is useless. Although Franklin took these fragments into account, further consideration by other critics might better establish the earliest genesis of some of her poems. And this large-format facsimile reminds us that Dickinson’s art is truly home-made, as Elizabeth Bishop might say (“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?” observes her Crusoe), and that it originates in a domesticity contrasting nicely with its vast metaphysical concerns.

So now Cristanne Miller’s new edition enters the picture. Like Johnson and Franklin, Miller is a scrupulous and thoughtful editor. She has chosen to present the poems by first transcribing the forty fascicles, then the unbound sheets on which Dickinson transcribed poems without grouping or binding them. These constitute the work Miller believes Dickinson most wanted to preserve because left in the most orderly state. After these roughly eleven hundred poems Miller presents poems left loose, transcribed by others, or sent to correspondents but not apparently retained by the poet. Miller has chosen to reproduce the texts as Dickinson transcribed them, in a complete although possibly unfinished state. Miller calls her own process “genetic editing” (a term I thought applied to manipulating the human genome), and acknowledges that Dickinson’s work was always in process, that the poems as she presents them may not embody the poet’s vision of her work in its ultimate completion. We will never know how far this text varies from that theoretical state of completion. Even in the fascicles, Dickinson frequently lists alternative words or whole lines, and Miller, although not attempting another variorum text, transcribes those alternate words into the generous white space on the right side of her page. So although this intends to be a reading text, we do get a good sense of the flux of Dickinson’s process, as well as a clear signal that the texts we possess are tentative and inherently unstable.

It is conjecture to think that Dickinson intended the fascicles and transcribed but unbound sheets to represent her poems as she wished them to be preserved. Perhaps she had no desire to preserve any of her work. If Bright’s Disease had not interrupted, maybe she would have eventually destroyed her poetry to protect it from the prying eyes and minds of strangers. It is equally possible that if she had remained healthy for another decade she would have recopied, decided on final texts, and shipped her work to a publisher. We just don’t know, and her extant manuscripts do not reveal whether she had any intentions beyond simply writing the poems and distributing a few to friends. So Miller’s subtitle As She Preserved Them must be regarded with skepticism. As She Left Them would be more accurate. Like the preceding editors of Dickinson, from Todd and Higginson to R. W. Franklin, she has bid for possession of Dickinson’s poems at that very auction of the mind the poet claimed to deplore. But ultimately no one, no editor or reader, can fully possess these poems, which so easily escape our intellectual grip and evaporate into the ether.

Miller’s bid, however, is as valid as anyone’s. Some years ago she wrote Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, an insightful look at the poet’s demanding and eccentric style. And now with further scholarly homework she has produced a comprehensive, thoughtfully framed, and readable text. Her introduction, although it says nothing about the poems as poetry and nearly everything about the poems as textual problems, gives a clear overall picture of the issues involved, and her fifty-nine pages of notes are invaluable for the general reader. My only complaint is the awkward way in which this text coordinates with Johnson’s and Franklin’s variorums. She has resisted numbering the poems, as they do, because, as she notes, Dickinson did not do so. Granted, those numbers do not belong above the texts. But to compare her texts with the variorums’ we have to refer to an index of first lines. Why not place the numbers in the white space on the right-hand side of the page, above the alternate words and lines? Off to the side they would not impinge on the text of the poem but would be handy for those of us who are interested enough to check the variorums for alternate versions and other information. Still, this is a minor issue. Miller has produced a conscientiously edited and highly readable text that gives us a clear overview of Dickinson’s work as she left it. This collection could supersede for classroom use the paperback version of Franklin’s edition as the most useful one-volume Dickinson, and it is a helpful supplement to the variorums and Franklin’s facsimile of the fascicles. Yet none of these complete editions is suitable for those new to Dickinson. For readers of poetry outside of the academy, if any exist, Johnson’s Final Harvest, a thoughtful and extensive selection from his 1955 variorum, remains the best introduction to Dickinson’s world.

Cristanne Miller, editor. Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0674737969. $30.00, hardcover

 

Other editions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry mentioned in this review:

Poems by Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston:

            Robert Brothers, 1890.

The Poems of Emily Dickinson. ed. Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University

            Press, 1955.

Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard

            University Press, 1981.

The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. R.W. Franklin. 3 vols. Cambridge:

            Harvard University Press, 1998.

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, ed. Jen Bervin and Marta Werner.   New York: New Directions, 2013.

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 [O1]

Jack Gilbert

(This review of Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems originally appeared in Harvard Review Online)

Jack Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, appeared in the Yale Younger Poets series in 1962. Soon out of print, it became a kind of cult classic. Gilbert’s revision of the classical lyric in a terse, colloquial modern idiom provided a brisk alternative to the beat and confessional voices coming into vogue. But twenty years of near silence ensued, until in 1982 he published Monolithos, which reprinted most of the first book and added a few new ones. Gilbert’s modest output still made him one of the most admired poets of the post-Lowell / Bishop generation. The publication of The Great Fires in 1995 significantly enhanced his reputation.  The poems about the death of his wife struck a tragic note that resonated with those who deplored the lack of drama and emotion in much contemporary poetry. Since then he has published two more books, making his old age (he is now eighty-seven) seem far more prolific than his youth. Now he has gathered this material, with twenty-one additional poems, into a Collected Poems more substantial than anyone would have predicted, given the output of his early years.

Reviewers typically dwell on the apparent simplicity of Gilbert’s poetry, its tendency toward statement, its lack of stanza breaks, its blocky form, and its candid emotional themes. “Plain-spoken, unmetered, pared to essentials,” claims Dwight Garner in a recent review.  But this describes what his poetry lacks rather than what it accomplishes. Gilbert’s best poems may seem readily grasped, but they are aesthetically complex and emotionally oblique. They layer imagery and registers of diction to construct small but highly charged worlds in which the slightest nuance can be life-changing. The tone is consistently elegiac, and leaves little room for the jokiness currently fashionable.  Irony abounds, but some reviewers are oblivious to it, and consequently miss the self-critical stance the speaker takes toward his own experience. The experience referenced in the later books is painful. Gilbert’s wife, Michiko Nogami, a sculptor, died of cancer in 1982. She was only thirty-six. She haunts Gilbert’s poetry, but so do many other women, including Linda Gregg, his partner for some years. He mourns the death of their relationship almost as poignantly as he does the actual death of Michiko. But elegy, however authentic, requires no triggering event; it is a way of seeing the world. The elegiac tone dominates even Views of Jeopardy, published long before the tragedy of life fully enveloped him.

“Recovering amid the Farms” (142) typifies Gilbert’s oblique aesthetic perceptions. The poem opens by toying with elements of the pastoral elegy:

Every morning the sad girl brings her three sheep

and two lambs laggardly to the top of the valley,

past my stone hut and onto the mountain to graze.

This could be a moment from Theocritus or Virgil, but the child’s sadness, we learn, turns not on the loss of a beloved but on her father’s determination to keep her out of the modern world:

            She turned twelve last year and it was legal

for the father to take her out of school. She knows

her life is over.

And now the speaker’s irony intervenes: “The sadness makes her fine, / makes me happy” because her presence not only completes the mock-pastoral scene but aesthetically enhances it:  “Her old red sweater makes / the whole valley ring, makes my solitude gleam.” In turn, his presence, although she may not realize it, enhances her dreary life: “I watch from hiding for her sake. Knowing I am / there is hard on her, but it is the focus of her days.” The astonishing egoism of this observation turns the whole poem in on itself. Far from being a pastoral elegy or pastoral anything, the poem is a profound self-critique of a life lived for the sake of aesthetic sensation. It is an argument against the notion of pure poetry, yet it also asks the reader to acknowledge the elegance of this willfully self-regarding perception:

            She always looks down or looks away as she passes

in the evening. Except sometimes when, just before

going out of sight behind the distant canebrake,

she looks quickly back. It is too far for me to see,

but there is a moment of white as she turns her face. 

The closure echoes Stanley Kunitz’s powerful “Father and Son”: “Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me / The white ignorant hollow of his face” as well as the glimpse of whiteness in Robert Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something”: “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?  For once, then, something.”  In all three poems, this glimpse of white answers a question the speaker hasn’t known how to ask. Also in all of these poems this whiteness looms over a gap between speaker and subject that embodies the difficulty of grasping the ineffable: the aesthetic, social, or psychological ideal. That ideal also emerges as emotional defiance. When the “girl shepherd” recurs in “A Kind of Courage” the speaker consoles her for her situation through an ironic contrast with  woman who loses her mind and undergoes serial rape, an ordeal that generates in the speaker a vision of “singing and dancing / and throwing down flowers nevertheless.” (257)

            Few contemporary poets write as paradoxically, ironically, and subtly as this. Fewer still can manipulate the elements of classical lyric genres to enrich the postmodern idiom of quotidian speech. Gilbert works this vein even in his grim Pittsburgh poems, in which America’s industrial dark, gloomy as Hades cross-grained with Blake’s dark satanic mills, gives way to high modernist irony:

            He thinks of the multitude of giant rats he killed

in those cavernous, Sunday-empty, neon-dark

steel mills. Remembers piling them up

on winter nights, the weight of each one after

the other. White mist on the black river outside.  (“Factoring,” 162)

In Gilbert’s white-on-black world nothing is simple, even when established in the plainest diction. White mist concealing a river is the negative reversal of a poem’s black type concealing (but also defining) a page. In our discourse-world of binary oppositions, concealment is the other face of revelation. William Logan claims in a review of Refusing Heaven that Gilbert’s poems “are interesting, not for the honesties they intend, but for the ones they conceal.”  But they aren’t concealing honesties: they are working to uncover them. Like all genuine honesties they are hard to find because the world itself has concealed them. Gilbert’s best poems—and certainly he has his clinkers—require subtle and ironic readers to appreciate them. If that makes their essential honesty difficult, it is difficult in the way that Frost (in “Directive”) required, “so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved.” Poetry like Gilbert’s doesn’t seek to save everyone, but a few perceptive readers may get lucky.

           

Galway Kinnell, Collected Poems

(this review appeared in Harvard Review Online, but has disappeared from their site)

Galway Kinnell’s muscular free verse became an important model for poets in the 1960s when his first three books appeared. While his friend Denise Levertov offered delicately constructed poems derived from William Carlos Williams’ terse rhythms, Kinnell reached back to Whitman’s poetics to embrace the irregular sequence of poems like “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” The most memorable poems of Kinnell’s first decades were sequences like “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” “The Last River,” “The Bear,” “Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock,” and The Book of Nightmares. These poems consist of series of distinct perceptions, each in a numbered section complete in itself but linked to those preceding or following.

The common subjects of these poems are the texture of the environment and the ways in which we weave ourselves into it: the rural landscape, in poems like “Freedom, New Hampshire,” or the urban scene, in the monumental “Avenue….” Kinnell’s primary concern is how we engage with these worlds and come to understand them . But in poems of totemic ritual and magic like “The Bear,” a mythic and instinctual grasp of nature and the cosmos comes into play, most fully realized in Kinnell’s 1971 volume The Book of Nightmares. In “Maud Moon” the speaker intuits an animal presence both inside and outside himself.  He reflects upon the birth of his daughter as concurrent with the forces of nature:

It is all over,

little one, the flipping

and overleaping, the watery

somersaulting alone in the oneness

under the hill, under

the old, lonely bellybutton,

pushing forth again

in remembrance,

the drifting there furled in the dark….                   (215)

Under the Maud moon, the moon commemorating the birth of his daughter Maud, he baptizes himself in the night and the dark river to ensure that his voice will survive him through this sequence to inform his daughter in the future. 

In the late 60s and early 70s, Kinnell became a popular reader at anti-war events. “Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond” contrasts the primal lives of frogs with the casual violence of deputies shooting dogs and napalm dropped by American warplanes. The poem reminds us that we are creatures of blood and flesh, and that the “drifting sun gives us our lives,” that we are continuous with the universe, with frogs and dogs and other humans, rather than creatures apart. Kinnell’s dramatic readings of this and other poems from Body Rags enthralled his audience, and made him one of our most visible poets.

While Kinnell remained a popular and effective oral performer, his work shifted after The Book of Nightmares. Becoming more intimate and personal, more focused on family, his poems also became more diffuse, losing some of the intensity of the earlier work. By slipping into domestic sentimentality, some poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980), nine years after Nightmares, are a little embarrassing, as in “After making Love We Hear Footsteps’:

            In the half-darkness we look at each other

            and smile

            and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—    (282)

Some of the other poems in this collection try to re-engage the ritual magic of nature, but only a couple of them succeed, including “Daybreak,” an entrancing and compact poem about starfish, and “The Gray Heron,” with its closure linking nature to human self-awareness:

            It stopped and tilted its head,

            which was much like

            a fieldstone with an eye

            in it, which was watching me

            to see if I would go

            or change into something else.        (294)

The Past (1985) temporarily abandons the sequence in favor of solid blocks of short poetry about Vermont rural life, some of which in their simplicity could have been written by Walter Hard. The few poems that court the natural sublime seemed forced, but many of the simple narratives, like “Break of Day,” are effective in their atmospheric realism. A few poems attempt a long Whitmanesque line, like “On the Oregon Coast,” but these tend toward wordiness and slack language.

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990) returns to sequences, to good effect. The title poem, which occupies the entire fourth section of the book, is one of Kinnell’s masterpieces. It is a fine evocation of the act of turning inward, focusing on the way the self changes and is changed by the creation surrounding it. Instead of looking outward to the magic of the natural sublime, this poem looks deeply into the complexities of the human animal alone with itself:

When one has lived a long time alone,

and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,

and the bullfrog head half out of water utters

the cantillations he sang in his first spring,

and the snake lowers himself over the threshold

and creeps away among the stones, one sees

they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,

after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken

away from one’s kind, toward these other kingdoms,

the hard prayer inside one’s own singing

is to come back, if one can, to one’s own,

a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,

when one has lived a long time alone.                        (425)

Imperfect Thirst (1994), and after a twelve-year gap, Strong is Your Hold (2006) mix sequence and narrative with varying degrees of success. Although he sometimes slips into garrulousness and cliché, Kinnell never entirely loses his way. Readers in the future will value him mostly for his masterful poems of the 1960s, but Kinnell’s lifelong love of the world and its creatures, his faith in natural process, and his attempts to reconcile nature and culture will continue to appeal to those who care about and want to understand our place on this planet.

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