"lives - like Dollars": Dickinson and the Poetics of Witness

Abstract

The term "witness" was often, when it first gained currency in the 1990s, conflated with the status of war's or injustice's victims, those speaking firsthand from the position of having suffered in some profound and unspeakable way. Dickinson does not liken her personal suffering to those suffering in the war, but the war haunts her own experience of pain; the poems of Fascicle 24 speak through the experience of war as it disturbs notions of truth, ethics, and the ways human life can be valued.

For the last few years I have been looking, rather obsessively, at how women poets as civilians address the fact of a war from a relative position of both physical safety and psychic discomfort. Do I repeat myself? Very well, then, I repeat myself. I am unable to contain the contradictions.

Author's note

Emily Dickinson is now considered a poet whose poetry bears witness to the Civil War, following Shira Wolosky's ground-breaking argument in Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (1984), and Dickinson's sense of the psychological wages that art pays to war to sing "off charnel steps" is surely among the more haunting phrases for what is an ethical as well as aesthetic dilemma.¹ She is, she acknowledges, writing her poems from the vantage point of the death house stairs (and stares), and it is that proximity which makes all the difference to her awareness, the consciousness in her poems.

I want to look at the way the war enters into a few poems—I'll focus on Fascicle 24—in the context of the notion of Dickinson as a poet of witness, an approach for which I have to thank the young Russian poet, Ilya Kaminsky, who recently remarked to me that he thought of her in this way. How so? I asked, intrigued. I've thought a good deal about the concept, but not in relation to Dickinson. It isn't what she saw externally, he said, but the way her poems are structured internally by the mind's unfolding visions. You're taking "witness" too figuratively, I said. You take them for imaginary when in fact many of the poems are carefully observed in their details. Not at all, he said, I look at how the poems see as compressed stories.

We were standing in the close stacks of Serendipity books in Berkeley, that fragile and rare thing these days, an independent bookseller—this one stuffed to the ceiling with used books. Books towered over us. The stacks, we discovered, moved. There were books behind books. Is there any Barbara Guest? I asked the owner. Did you try the women's bathroom? he asked me. No, I said, it did not occur to me to look in the women's bathroom. So, in he went to look for me. No Guest (he later found two of her books—one quite rare—in a pile under his desk). Ilya had wandered off to see if there was some Cid Corman.The moment's exchange had been supplanted by other matters. There was a lunch. There would be a reading. Then a cab to catch a plane.

The term "witness" was often, when it first gained currency in the 1990s, conflated with the status of war's or injustice's victims, those speaking firsthand from the position of having suffered in some profound and unspeakable way. There is little doubt that some personal trauma caused Dickinson to suffer, and that her poems bear witness to the experience, although its origins are mysterious because she never names it. As Benjamin Friedlander observes of her method in the first study of Dickinson and trauma, she relies on analogy "to represent an experience whose chief characteristic is its resistance to representation" (177).² Trauma is defined, he notes, as an "experience too extreme to be accommodated safely or adequately in consciousness or language" (182). The poem of witness serves then as "trace" of an event that remains beyond language but is, as Carolyn Forché writes, testament that something took place (31). The poetic...