Dickinson in the Kitchen

Abstract

"Dickinson in the Kitchen" a tasty take on Dickinson as cook and poet.

She's a cliché, right? Bent over the stove, weighing, measuring, stirring, portioning out the sweet and bitter, the sour and salty: she's John Crowe Ransom's notorious "little home-keeping person"—one who wrote poems, added Ransom's contemporary R. P. Blackmur, as "indefatigably as some women cook or knit." She's a cliché and even a sexist cliché, for who would want to align herself with men who saw this great artist's life as "a humdrum affair of little distinction" in which "the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of anti-macassars."

And yet—and yet, my Emily Dickinson has always inhabited a kitchen, though not perhaps a very ordinary one. We know, don't we?, that she very likely kept a basket of language handy—snippets of sentences, odd usages, off rhymes—as she brooded over batter and butter. We know that she probably salted phrases while snipping herbs, sweetened quatrains and quarts of cream at the same time.Look, there she is, between the stove and the window, in a white dress unsullied by anyone's sauciness, suddenly flashing toward us a knowledgeable gaze from eyes "like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves" (L268).

When I've put Emily Dickinson with all her magical selves—"Emily, Emilie, Brother Emily, Uncle Emily"—into a poem, she's always been in or near a kitchen. My first poem about her, "Emily's Bread," virtually dictated itself long ago when I learned that she'd judged a bread-baking contest; there I imagined her as the inhabitant of a sort of culinary prison:

Inside the prize-winning blue-ribbon loaf of bread, there is Emily, dressed in white, veiled in unspeakable words, not yet writing letters to the world.

No, now she is the bride of yeast, the wife of the dark of the oven, the alchemist of flour, poetess of butter, stirring like a new metaphor in every bubble

as the loaf begins to grow.

But the next of my Dickinson poems presented me with a very different version and vision of Dickinson in the kitchen, one that enthralled but mystified me. I was fascinated at that time by Dickinson's genius at metamorphosis—her fluid and fluent selves that were brother, uncle, cousin, male, female, and always magical. I adored her boastfulness, what she called "Uncle Emily's ardor for the lie" and followed with the swaggering claim that "My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles" (L315). Most of all I was hooked on her recipe for "black cake"—a recipe that begins, if you recall, "2 pounds Flour - / 2 Sugar - / 2 Butter - / 19 Eggs - " and "5 pounds Raisins - " among other ingredients and may take "5 to 6 hours" to bake "in Milk pan, if full - " (L835a). It must surely end with a cake so massive one imagines that the citizens of Amherst may well have all gathered to consume it as part of some lyrical ceremony on the village green. She herself, remember, defined it as "the swarthy Cake baked only in Domingo" although, as I quickly realized, Domingo was always her own kitchen (L835).

My poem "The Emily Dickinson Black Cake Walk" meditated therefore on Dickinson's kitchen as (Santo) Domingo, the ancient capital of spice—earliest European settlement in the New World—out of which emerged a darkly nutritive sweetness for which I longed because it was in some sense flesh of Dickinson's own poetic flesh. In fact, this poem became a prayer for aesthetic manna, an invocation of transformation:

Black cake, black Uncle Emily cake, I tunnel among your grains of darkness fierce as a mouse: your riches are all my purpose, your currants and death's eye raisins wrinkling and thickening blackness, and the single almond of light she buried somewhere under layers of shadow . . .

One day I too will be Uncle Sandra: iambic and terse. I'll hobble the tough...