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  • A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson
  • Logan Esdale (bio)
Thomas Gardner . A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. $45.00

A Door Ajar continues Thomas Gardner's interest in poetic influence and in conversations between artist and critic. An early book (1989) was on Whitman and poetry of the 1960s-70s; in Regions of Unlikeness (1999), he included interviews with poets whose work he was explaining. Here he couples essays and interviews again, this time with Marilynne Robinson, Charles Wright, Susan Howe and Jorie Graham at the microphone—one chapter on the work, as it relates to Dickinson, followed by a conversation with the writer. Gardner asks for their personal histories with Dickinson (first encounters), and how living with her work has informed their own. The analysis chapters were written before the interviews took place, and the latter "press," Gardner claims, "sometimes forcefully, against my initial arguments" (231). If that sequence had been reversed, he might have responded to their comments. For example, Howe mentions that Dickinson's letters are the model for her prose style, but the letters are nowhere discussed in his analysis chapter, which focuses on her prose books My Emily Dickinson (1985) and The [End Page 115] Birth-mark (1993). I wonder as well about the accuracy of his claim—in my reading there are few ripples of disagreement. But if gaps exist between some of what A Door Ajar claims to do—which is reconfigure the academic book by unsettling the critic's authority through dialogue with the artists—and what it actually does, the attempt must still be applauded.

To measure Dickinson's influence on four writers, Gardner defines the significance of her work rather generally: they have all learned from how she invokes that which cannot be "fully known." Each of them arrives at a line of circumference that separates the known world from a spiritual condition that can be experienced only momentarily. On the subject of that line there is the book's central poem, "I cannot live with You," and the first three lines of its final stanza: "So we must meet apart - / You there - I - here - / With just the Door ajar." (Graham's Swarm [2000], the main subject of Gardner's essay on her, was "animated" throughout by this poem.) As Gardner says, "For Dickinson, to track one's experience with a beloved is no different from tracking one's encounter with poetry [since] both seem to follow the same pattern of coming overpoweringly near and then moving inexplicably away" (9). He suggests the phrase "responsive brokenness" as pertinent to the work of all four; and punctuating the book are summaries, such as "Like Robinson's 'imperfectly partial' analogies, Wright's scoured attention to what refuses him access, and Howe's improvised soundings of the unknown, Graham's enactments of vertigo open her language to a wilderness, something other, that can be inhabited but never mastered" (168).

Fraying this thread run among the writers, however, is a lurking and perhaps impossible question: how is it that Dickinson appeals to writers (of both genders) along the aesthetic spectrum? This book for Gardner is less about his view of Dickinson and more about inviting three poets and a novelist into the critical discussion. Having four perspectives on Dickinson does produce many luminous moments. And it must be noted that the analysis chapters are extensions of the interviews because in them Gardner quotes the writers at length. But Gardner himself, when his turn comes, offers too steadily just one Dickinson in an effort to provide a Dickinson that they could share in common. He suggests that "their at times opposed aesthetic commitments must have blinded us" to their mutual conversations with Dickinson, yet leaves us to discern for ourselves (in the respective interviews especially) what those various commitments are (229). Wright will admit that he took "nothing stylistically" from Dickinson—"It was all content," he says (105)—and we can see that Howe is positioned otherwise. [End Page 116]

"Such distances under her fingertips!" says Wright of Dickinson, whose "There's a certain Slant of light" (Fr320) has been the "ur-poem in...

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