So

Abstract

" - SO - " is a poem-essay meditating on the distance between Dickinson's poetics and those of modernist pedagogues such as Pound, Stein, Zukofsky, with a focus on the difference between Dickinson's stance toward the reader and that recommended by Olson in "Projective Verse."

Reading Dickinson makes me confront my modernist poetic upbringing at a particularly unflattering angle. Primitive questions re-occur to me, the stupid early ones, like, How good is Emily Dickinson? compared to Williams? compared to Stein? to Pound, to Zukofsky, to Olson? to Eliot? This group of modernist pedagogues of whom I became the young interpellant are heteroclite, but they do share something of a common blindspot when it comes to Dickinson. Yes, there is Stein's "Sacred Emily," but isn't that at most an indeterminate nod in Dickinson's direction, without really having anything to do with any word Dickinson wrote? Perhaps the heteroclite group were uniformly deafened by her hymn metrics (IM mor TAL i TY, which to this day my modernist ear can never register without a small shock of boredom). Or perhaps they never listened. Does Pound mention her? Pound's pronouncements are easily memorizable, but nothing concerning Dickinson comes to mind. She's not mentioned in ABC of Reading or in Zukofsky's Test of Poetry, nor is she in the index of "A." Susan Howe's use of Williams's American Grain idiocy, ". . . . Poets? Where? They are the test. But a true woman in flower, never. Emily Dickinson, starving of passion in her father's garden, is the very nearest we have ever been—starving," as the epigraph to My Emily Dickinson is chilling. Here is the thoroughly inventive, socially perspicacious Williams completely out to lunch. It's not the only time, of course, but, still, how can one of the central poets of the twentieth century so miss the performance of one the central poets of the nineteenth century? Does what makes Dickinson's writing so compelling just not register in modernist terms?

Another thread of modernism-trouble Dickinson brings is that while she was unstudiously avoided by the aforementioned pedagogues, she was picked up on by Tate and Winters, and thus seemed a counter in the wrong game played by the wrong poet-critics, the modernist-tamers, whose poetry was only accessible via their imposing critical anterooms.

Even though I know, rationally, that her work didn't surface in any serious form until after most of the modernist pedagogy was set and that thus her absence from it has a simple historical explanation, still, one strand among the effects when I read Dickinson seriously is a troubled awareness of the possible thinness at the heart of my modernist formation. Perhaps the modernists weren't just too early for Dickinson, perhaps they're just plain wrong. (Again: rationally, I know that poetry's house has many mansions, but still . . .)

Two of the most powerful reactions I have when reading Dickinson are exhilaration and a sense of inadequacy, which are two of her most powerful subjects. She phrases it more concisely in a poem I quote in one of my first collage pieces:

An ignorance a Sunset Confer opon the Eye - Of Territory - Color - Circumference - Decay -

It's Amber Revelation Exhilarate - Debase - Omnipotence' inspection Of Our inferior face -

(Fr669; quoted in "Essay on Style," 7 Works)

My Immortality-aversion was already in place, preventing me from quoting the last stanza: "And when the solemn features / Confirm - in Victory / We start - as if detected / In Immortality - "

An ignorance a Dickinson poem Confer upon the reading Eye or, if not a poem, then any bit of her writing

An ignorance "Of Territory - Color - / Circumference - Decay"—how abstractly Dickinson writes! She's certainly not following Pound's advice to "go in fear of abstractions." His example of it, "dim lands of peace," is visually lax and emotionally bland so of course poets should go in fear of that.

Whereas using a grid like Territory, Color, Circumference, Decay is to name enlightenment tools of orientation and categorization without grounding them in any narrated situation, with Decay then adding the shock of uncontextualized...