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In celebration of National Poetry Month, Emily Dickinson’s Victoria’s Secret spread:
The blonde assures me The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
is a good novel, but I can’t bring myself to read it. I’m not interested in Dickinson’s love life. Falls into the “Things I Don’t Need to Know” department.
But maybe I should force myself to read it as a necessary corrective. I’ve known more than a few poets and academics, male and female, who’ve admitted to serious crushes on the Belle of Amherst and I’ve never been able to see it. Every time I get a glimpse of that winsome little middle-aged neurotic in the white dress peeking out from around the corners of one of her poems, spying on my reading the way she eavesdropped on the conversations of guests she refused to meet face to face, I get queasy and put the book back on the shelf.
Maybe if I could see her as a vibrant and vital young woman burning with sexual fires she couldn’t quench because her society and times wouldn’t allow it, if I could think of her as she might be today, not a quasi-cloistered, virtually unpublished poet, but a soaring lyricist performing her own songs in clubs and bars, singing over the heads of the dancing fanboys and fangirls in the audience to the as yet unmet soul mate she knows is out there in the shadows, the only one who truly understands (I probably shouldn’t be listening to Little Boots
right now), I would have a new and stronger appreciation for her poetry.
Sex, adultery, scandal touched her family and her circle, so why not her too? And she did write one of the great poems about masturbation, although some people insist it’s only about flowers. Go figure.
I tend my flowers for thee—
Bright Absentee!
My Fuchsia's Coral Seams
Rip—while the Sower—dreams—
Geraniums—tint—and spot—
Low Daisies—dot—
My Cactus—splits her Beard
To show her throat—
Carnations—tip their spice—
And Bees—pick up—
A Hyacinth—I hid—
Puts out a Ruffled Head—
And odors fall
From flasks—so small—
You marvel how they held—
Globe Roses—break their satin glake—
Upon my Garden floor—
Yet—thou—not there—
I had as lief they bore
No Crimson—more—
Thy flower—be gay—
Her Lord—away!
It ill becometh me—
I'll dwell in Calyx—Gray—
How modestly—alway—
Thy Daisy—
Draped for thee!
I’m someone who’d rather think it’s about flowers. I just think it’s better that I don’t know it isn’t.
Maybe if I read the novel my appreciation for her work might increase. But, based on past experiences with too much information, I’m afraid there’s an even greater chance I won’t be able to read her ever again.
Couple months back I wrote a post called Writers I have known and loathed that was mostly about one writer I’d come to loathe. He was the author of a couple short story collections I admired but when he came to Iowa when I was in grad school there he showed himself up as such a complete jerk that I couldn’t stand to see his name on the cover of a book anymore, and I haven’t read a thing he has written since.
Something similar but even more disappointing happened when a poet I’d recently become a big fan of came to visit. Iowa was where I finally “got” poetry. An offhand remark by another poet, who was on the faculty at the time, in one of my classes my first or second week there, triggered something in my brain and suddenly I could do something I’d never been able to do, read a poem. This was thrilling and for the next few weeks I read nothing but poetry, which confused my fellow fiction writing friends no end. And while I was on this poetry jag, this first poet, a Pulitzer Prize winner, came to read.
Before he arrived, I bought a collection of his poems and devoured it. It was terrific stuff! The best I’d read so far. I couldn’t wait to meet him.
He visited my class first. He was tall, shambling, dirty, disheveled. His hair was greasy and uncombed and he wore a wrinkled and soiled-looking seersucker suit the pants of which were torn from below his left knee to his hip.
Not that I took much notice of that. He was a poet, after all, and while all the students and teachers on the poetry side of the Workshop seemed to find time for showers and a regular change of clothes, I’d known plenty of artistic types who had issues when it came to grooming and personal hygiene.
Wasn’t until I realized that his fashion statement wasn’t the result of a temperamental indifference to the dictates of cultural norms but an intense devotion to whiskey.
He was hungover.
And it was one of those hangovers where you’re still half in the bag but sober enough to feel terrible and anticipate how even more terrible you’re going to feel when you sober up completely.
Made him a little grumpy.
He opened up the floor to questions and I jumped right in. His collection included several longish poems that were in effect short stories and naturally, as an aspiring writer of short stories who couldn’t (and still can’t) write a short story, these had caught my attention, and I started to ask him how he went about distilling a narrative down to fifty odd lines. He cut me right off.
“Oh, I don’t write those kind of poems anymore,” he growled and moved on to look for the next hand up.
Gotta admit. I was hurt. And embarrassed.
But I was over it by the time I went to his reading that evening.
So was he. He wasn’t grouchy anymore. He was ebullient.
Ok, he was probably drunk. But the point is he was in a much better mood and gave a very entertaining reading, which I’ve since learned is something very few writers can actually do. He even read a couple of the short story poems I liked.
And then he announced he was going to read a new poem.
It’s a little long, he warned us.
It’s more of a short story than a poem, he said.
I’m proud to say I did not heave my copy of his book at his head.
He was still wearing the same grubby suit, by the way. Someone had given him a couple of safety pins to close the rip in his pants.
That was a disappointing encounter but that’s not the whole reason I haven’t been able to read his poetry since, even though I’ve held onto that book.
Some while after that I found my way to the work of yet another poet, a young woman I’m not about to name for a reason you’ll understand in a minute. I liked her poetry too and started asking around the Workshop if anybody knew her because I thought she’d be a good person to invite to come read.
Turned out several people knew her. Many more knew of her. She was somewhat notorious.
Ok, from here on this post is not for children and may not be safe for work.
According to my sources, this poet, although admittedly talented, had not achieved the success and acclaim she’d achieved solely because of her talent at writing verse.
She had another talent, highly valued by other, older, influential male poets.
She gave great head.
She was the blow job queen of the American poetry scene.
This wasn’t simply gossip, I was told. She was proud of her talent and she boasted about it. Apparently, besides being the reason she was invited to so many workshops and writers colony, it was the highlight of the their time there for other attendees---the poet would announce ahead of time which of the older male poets she intended to go down on and then afterwards, late at night, around the campfire, as it were, regale people with the details.
She wore a rubber band around her wrist all the time, my sources said, that she removed and used to enhance the pleasure of the man and of herself. She liked the moment to last. And this is where the Pulitzer Prize winning poet returns to the narrative.
The young woman poet was not discreet, as you can tell. She named names when she boasted of her conquests, and she named the Pulitzer Prize winner as one of her great disappointments. She liked a challenge and he didn’t present her with one.
It was all over in a sec with him.
“Comes on a dime,” she supposedly said.
I’ve never been able to read any of her work ever since either.
So, I think I’ll keep my image of Emily Dickinson as it is, because I don’t want to risk having to give up this:
There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom's electric moccasin
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!
________________
Sunday morning. My mentioning of the poet at Iowa whose offhand comment tripped some switch in my brain that suddenly let me know how to read a poem so that I understood it, reminded Bill Nothstine that once upon a time when he and the world were young he had missed a chance to have the art of writing explained to him by an offhand remark by a famous writer. Read his post The 120-second thunderbolt.
Bill dropped by a note, too, asking me what that poet---whose name I won’t drop here because I don’t want to risk anyone confusing her with either of those other two poets, though I will tell you that she’d just had a baby who she and her poet husband had named Emily after guess who---had said. Bill admits he still doesn’t “get” poetry and he was hoping that poet’s remark would open things up for him that way it had for me. I had to tell him that for the life of me I can’t remember what she said. All I remember is that she was discussing one of her poems and I had book opened to that poem when she said whatever it was she said. As I wrote to Bill:
I had the book in my hand and was looking at the poem and I swear it was like a scene in a movie where a character is staring at some ancient runes that suddenly rearrange themselves on the stone tablet and become English words. One second I was looking at an indecipherable arrangement of symbols and the next I was reading a poem.
Sorry, Bill. But maybe this post by my friend, the poet Steve Kuusisto, will help.
and 
,
in my hands. Actually, it’s balancing on my knee as I type this. But it has been in my hands and will be again. Although it was published in 2009, this copy feels as virgin as the copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot Levine tells of reading in the library one day sixty years ago when he was a young man playing hooky from work as a delivery truck driver in a poem called “Library Days” which I just finished reading…in the library. I’m reading a poem called “Library Days” in the library, a cliche, a banality, reading about Levine reading, or actually reading about Levine remembering about reading, forced to contemplate the absurdity of vicariously experiencing someone else vicariously re-experiencing a vicarious experience, a joke Levine couldn’t help playing on his readers. No doubt he regrets the necessity. What’s a poet to do? The kind of people who read poems are the kind of people who go to libraries. But, hey, I hear the now very old poet saying, You’re in a library. You’re reading poetry. You’re complaining?
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