The Master Letters (review)

Here is one reason why the allegorical paintings reproduced in Judith Farr's The Passion of Emily Dickinson look strange: they were encoded in the years of Emily Dickinson's girlhood and youth, when a picture was always a picture of. The idea that color and shape and meaning are attribute of the picture, not of its subject, came later. The idea that language, too, can have significance independent of its occasion came later still. But it controls our reading now. The Master Letters, a collection of fifty-two poems and epistles conceived as "a series of latter-day Master Letters [that] echo formal and rhetorical devices from Dickinson's work" (vii), therefore comes to us as a translation from the Ancient.

How does the translation work? Consider the beginning of the poem called "The Supernatural Is Only the Natural, Disclosed":

At your feet, I am a shoemaker's apprentice,Toxic in a long day of fumes. I'm listening

To the fluorescent light come onIn April, flinging a hot white scarf

Across a month mottled by the chemicalsOf eastern standard time, in the spokes of wheels

Of hormones turning in an unseasoned sky. In a gospelAccording to Hunters, you name your bird

Without a gun. You sit & watch as one does in the woods,Contemplating prey, awefully. You have a heart

As large as a silver cleat, a small thing.I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable.

Brock-Broido's note keys the title and the italicized line to L280, Dickinson's dispatch from her observation post to Thomas Wentworth Higginson's war zone. But there is more, of course. Johnson's note to L342b quotes Higginson on his first meeting with Dickinson—"I could only sit still and watch, as one does in the woods; I must name my bird without a gun"—and in L248 Dickinson tells "Master," "I've got a cough as big as a thimble—but I dont care for that. . . . Her master stabs her more." Brock-Broido refers to such ghostly traces of prior language with a visual metaphor. "I use the term refract," she says, "to mean—a nod, a pilfering—an homage, in each case, to the Original" (78).

With the dashes and the capital letters and the self-conscious feyness, Brock-Broido pays homage in a playfully direct way. With the private allusions to fluorescent light and time zones, too, Brock-Broido hints at a translation of Dickinson's secret language, the lexicon of white and circumference. The Master Letters partakes of cento and palimpsest. But it is not an imitation. There is a difference in purpose and outcome between Emily Dickinson and Lucie Brock-Broido, and perhaps that difference isn't so much a matter of contrasting individualities as the index of a change in the way we read. Since Dickinson's time, since the time when Hemingway's Lieutenant Henry discovered on the battlefield that "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene," language has been chastened and made tentative. For poets like Charles Bernstein, that tentativeness offers the hope of a new language, one that no longer has to placate the absent spirit of external reference. But for Brock-Broido, whose words are haunted by the facsimile of L233 that fills the first page of her book, there can be only a generalized anxiety with regard to meaning. One symptom of that anxiety is the nature of Brock-Broido's involvement with the subjects of her poems: an assimilation of reference, followed by a brooding deconstruction of that reference into a series of inflowing and merging echoes. At the center of the sound there is an uttering presence, but it is not a self in any ordinary sense of the word. It is a volume of Dickinsonian spells, opening and closing and opening again to another almost audible, not quite readable page.

So the careful apparatus of Brock-Broido's introduction and notes signal only that these poems can...