I.E., On Emily & Influence
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPA poem (“E is for Emily”), followed by a brief discussion of Dickinson's impact on contemporary poetry and general comments on the notion of poetic influence.
E is for Emily
The glaring Yes, the whitewashed winter. A hematin
Plumed blue-black sky as uniform overhead sight.
The embarrassment of dreams shrunken
Under the white dress. Gray dust on the dresser, whiteAgain on the side of a digit drawn along the surface
Of the leaf right next to the thorn. And cold now.
Cheeks flushed, a flippety banter ever fluttering
In the brain. In the background, an Oh, Look!With an easy exclamation mark. In the black habitat
Of nightfall, the diamond-facet from the eave is the icicle.
That drip-drip-drip, a ravishing spectacle. Herself
As herself and inside the house. At the drop of a sigh—Everything beneath: distal beginning to proximal banister—
A thing of significance: Death with her name on a bracelet. [End Page 67]
Emily gets E in the alphabet series because much, if not most, of contemporary poetry is, at least tangentially, descended from her. Which isn't to argue that contemporary poetic effects are limited to her directly, but only that she, alongside Whitman, created what now appears as a break with a new beginning that others have since added to by torquing, torturing, or in whatever way, hammer-slamming poetry into its present zeitgeist. In her case, the strict concision. The bravado of one's own face behind a death mask staring out at the reader in the abbreviated form of two eyes fluttering. The clever messiness. The rejection of the expected. The marriage of passion with the play of paradox. The adament use of the substituting metaphor. The "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse - it does not mean - me - but a supposed person" (L268). The poem as a drama on the stage of a single precise emotion. The hypersensitivity. The psychological astuteness and irrepressible candor that together add up to audacity. The isolation of a mind apart. The excess. The disconcerting disclosures. The hint of narrative. The novel verbal strategies. The insistence on a text that refuses to provide easy answers in the face of difficult subjects. The polyvocalism: sometimes a child, sometimes a schoolgirl, sometimes a wife, sometimes a woman refusing—sometimes with humor, sometimes with erotic heat. The break, again first seen in Whitman, with the traditional sentimental poem of predictable shape and language. And so on and so forth.
Dickinson, Karl Shapiro (a library copy of V for a school assignment with a friend parsing the poems for me . . ."It's about the war." "Ah."), William Wordsworth (after the borrowed heat of watching Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty under a waterfall in Splendor in the Grass. "Though nothing can bring back the hour . . ."), Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind, gifted to me by the same friend who parsed Shapiro for me on the day we skipped school together. From somewhere, e.e. cummings, from somewhere else, Edna St. Vincent Millay (Richard Howard said, when I told him I'd read her in adolescence—"Yes, my Dear, that's when one should read her." Clearly suggesting that if one kept reading her past that point, one was surely thwarted in one's social and emotional development.) It's an odd mix, those poets. But then any group of poets makes up an odd mix. Eliot came on the heels of the above, and Plath a litte later along the way. Which is all to say, adolescent romantic notions initially found lyric poetry and willed the parade into being but eventually other concerns surfaced and changed the experience of reading. Dickinson has been there, a constant influencing each new outcome.
What does it mean "to influence"? That something (or someone) contributes to one's received idea. In this case, the received notion of what a poem is, or might be...
