Song of a Reformed Headhunter

This is a biography of Emily Dickinson and an examination of who gets to say who she was after her death. On the Life, Gordon is at pains to dispel the legend of a retiring and reticent poet, an image so at odds with the poetry. Gordon shows that Dickinson used her correspondence as so many "lassoes" to grapple kindred spirits to her. A chapter is devoted to her love affair with Lord Judge, to whom Emily wrote expressively, even passionately, of her feelings. Regarding her brother Austin's adulterous relationship with Mabel Loomis Todd, Dickinson was prevented by her dependency on her brother from attacking the affair directly, but she wrote many subtly barbed letters to Mabel Todd and refused to see her at all, despite approaches by the latter. Emily, in Gordon's hands, appears as a fierce and uncompromising spirit. Her seclusion, Gordon argues persuasively, was not due to disappointed love, as legend would have it, but the stigma of epilepsy. The Fit, as coded in ma...

Homage to Emily Dickinson Born—Bridalled—Shrouded—/In   a Day—             Emily Dickinson, “ Title divine—is mine!” Survivors—all—they tell of Burns Inside the cell of Brain. The polish shines the—groping—breaks That lit—before—the grain. There’s one—can blow apart and show What fits her for the Hit, The Aura of approaching—Sense Into household white— To find the Fork—the Juncture found And travel—twisting—both Down to the Smallest Severance, Unspoused Lightning—unearthed—

In the Mind of God This world is not conclusion           Emily Dickinson I’m not the son of a carpenter, your every look told me. Living in mistaken circumstances, I’m the son of a king. I tried to please my father by picking up the rip saw but I could see, even at five, words cut more readily. I’m the son of a king, so I thought and thought until a star dropped from the sky, then I’m the son of God. I bade you farewell, wiped your eyes with my wrists, set off to find the falling star and seize my destiny. The men, the neediest men, I ordered to follow me. The women I pitied for their strength and told not to sin. When they told me you were outside, asking for your son, I knew then I didn’t belong to you, I belonged to them. Be strong, woman, the cross you see is not a cross. Far away, a woman will write, This world is not conclusion. Be comforted, woman, all of us are never who we seem. My son, this is your mother. My mother,...

The Garden joined forces with the Poetry Society of America to present a series of readings of Emily Dickinson's poems. Last night's kickoff had Billy Collins, Marie Ponsot and Brenda Wineapple (a biographer). Collins, reading partly from his introduction to a selected Dickinson, was particularly witty and concise. The Garden Cafe was packed to overflow, with about 150 people who had traveled to this location twenty minutes by train from Grand Central Station. Before the reading, HS and I wandered in Emily's Victorian homestead, recreated in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. We admired the tulips, heliotropes, bellflowers, camelias, daisies, columbines, peonies, and roses but were especially taken by the spectacular foxgloves. The lilacs, HS's favorite because of their lovely smell, were gone. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd...

TLS March 19 2010 from Benjamin Markovits' review of Lyndall Gordon's LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS: Emily Dickinson and her family's feuds : . . . Henry James's description of the writer's life from The Middle Years : "We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art". Oe John Berryman's Dream Songs : "I am obliged to perform in complete darkness/ operations of great delicacy/ on my self". * By dressing up such riddles as a kind of Hamlet ploy. Gordon obscures something important about Dickinson: her preciousness, her pretension. In the process, we lose what is moving about her story. For Gordon, Emily's refusal to publish shows a heroic unwillingness to bow to public expectations, rather than the self-defeating stubbornness of a lonely inhibited woman who has become suspicious of the way her passions alienate people. It is true that her fi...

Nine more days before the start of my New York Writers Workshop class, and I have four sign-ups. The class needs six to run, so I'm casting around for ways to make the numbers. I've sent out pest emails, posted on craigslist, blanketed Cornelia Street Cafe with homemade flyers for three Fridays, recruited friends to spread the word, and left a flyer with the neighborhood falafel shop. Preparing for the first class on sonnets, I remembered Molly Peacock's lovely poem about the shoulders of women, a sonnet as it turned out. I read it first in Raw Heaven , and liked it still more when I read it again in her Cornucopia: New and selected poems. The Shoulders of Women The shoulders of women are shallow, narrow, and thin compared to the shoulders of men, surprisingly thin, like the young pharaohs whose shoulders in stick figures are written on stones, or bony as the short gold wings of cranes on oriental screens. Lord, how surprising to embrace the shortened stirrings of many bone...

I love reading Stevie Smith. She always cheers me up, or haunts me, even when it is a poem I have read several times. She is the girl with whom I run away into the woods, the older sister I curl up against, knowing that she is as frightened as I am but pretends that being lost is quite fun, really. Not that she does not acknowledge her own fears. But she tells of them in stories that charm me, and make me laugh or cry. Scorpion 'This night shall thy soul be required of thee' My soul is never required of me It always has to be somebody else of course Will my soul be required of me tonight perhaps? (I often wonder what it will be like To have one's soul required of one But all I can think of is the Out-Patients' Department-- 'Are you Mrs Briggs, dear?' No, I am Scorpion.) I should like my soul to be required of me, so as To waft over grass till it comes to the blue sea I am very fond of grass, I always have been, but there must Be no cow, person or house to be se...