Questions or things to eat or what?
Yes.
I doubt that there was an influence on your work,
from her, but when did you realize that you
were in love with her poetry?
This is going to age me, but in 1976 summer.
I graduated from high school then.
I don't think I even quite knew I was a poet.
No I didn't graduate from high school,
I graduated from college.
And I went to England and I was supposed
to go to a program in the William Butler Yeats School
in Ireland.
And I ended up buying at a bookstore in London,
the complete poems of Emily Dickinson
and stopping in Cambridge and never
leaving there for two weeks.
Reading Emily Dickinson and writing poems every day
and I never went to the Yeats school
and I never regretted it.
And, so that's one I have an answer to OK.
Thank you.
I know, though, that I was aware of her art work earlier,
but I hadn't dived into it in that way.
Yeah.
Yes, here and then here.
What, would you say, is the toughest part about getting
your work published?
Well it was there in one of her late poems, I say endurance.
Keeping at it.
Believing in your work.
Sometimes even when it seems like the responses
you get you don't think others do.
But also not treating this work as an individual enterprise,
but becoming an activist.
If you're getting involved with journals,
get involved with presses, get involved with reading series,
become part of communities, and sometimes those communities
will be local sometimes they will be they will have friends
and things across space.
And as more and more people know what you're doing
and share your work, you have much better chances
of getting published.
Yes.
I have a vocabulary question.
Use a word to describe the sets of a bee buzzing.
Proprioception.
P-R-O-P-R-I-O-C-E-P-T-I-O-N. It is a real word,
although it was used sort of famously by the American poet,
Charles Olson, and it's sort of the body's sense of itself.
I'm wondering if you could replace
Emily as an American poet because with all
of this rhythm, rhythmic words, vigorous words,
it almost seems to be much more aligned
with the European tradition.
So would you agree with that, or what quality
would you say, and maybe rhythmically, forth
as an American?
Well we all have different ideas about what American poets are.
I mean I think of American poetry
as being highly inventive.
And while I recognize that her roots are in Shakespeare
and Keats, for example, and she didn't
break those bonds in the way that Whitman did, for example.
And in that way she actually has more in common
with other poets of her time that we
don't read so much anymore.
On the other hand, in her own way, she did break those bonds.
What I was talking about her, the interpretive qualities
in her work, the highly idiosyncratic quality
of her work, but we didn't really
start seeing that and understanding it
until really the 1950s when her work became
available to us in something closer to the way she wrote it.
I mean I could, there are other ways of understanding her.
I mean all of the odd and absolutely wonderful
gender bending in her work.
I think that I referred to a couple of times
seems much more modern.
I don't know if it seems more American per se,
but much more modern than most of the poets of her time.
In a way I think of Dickinson as such a unique poet
that I'm not so concerned about her nationality.
Although there are certain things
about being the loaded gun and the being in Western
Massachusetts that appear in her poems
in images that are localized.
So that's American, but in terms of her,
what you're talking about her rhythms,
I actually sort of agree with you
that her teachers are the European and particularly
English poets and yet, she does twist them
in ways nobody else was doing.
Yes, Margaret.
You talked about-- you question this again
reading versions of the poems [INAUDIBLE]
Can you talk a little bit about what they do?
Sure they did all kinds of things.
They removed those dashes, they more regularly
punctuated the work, and they even
went so far as to changing rhyming words to make
her rhymes more regular.
And sometimes changing the phrasing a little
bit to make the rhythms more regular too.
Now I don't think they, I don't want
to say they were intentionally ruining Emily Dickinson they.
Were working under the strictures of their own time
and thinking that they were helping her poems
to be publishable, to be more widely read
by the audience of that time.
And maybe that was true.
It may be a modern readership responds
to the way she wrote the poems in a way
that the readership of her own time would not have.
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE] --sung to the Yellow Rose of Texas.
Oh I wish you hadn't said that.
If you want to not do what I was sort of encouraging you to do.
And read the interruptions in Dickinson
and read her poems strictly in the iambic pentameter,
you can put them to the tunes of a pop,
to the rhythm of a popular song The Yellow Rose of Texas.
Not every poem but many of them.
And I think a student told me that once.
And I sort of wish I had never heard it.
Now you've all heard it.
So but that's OK.
That's fine.
It is.
There is something about her rhythm
that is actually quite simple and basic.
And what becomes interesting about
it is how she stops it and extends it with her punctuation
and gaps in things.
Now that to me anyway.
Let's go to the back because you guys don't get as much
of a chance OK.
[INAUDIBLE]
OK.
One is, if you had a chance to ask her one question or two
hours, or two what do you think would ask?
Eric would you want to answer any of those questions
yourself?
No you don't want to.
OK.
I think I just might want to ask her if I could simply
spend a few minutes in her presence
and go over a poem with her.
It's funny I mean I'm not so curious as some people are
as to, who is this great lover she had, or this or that,
but more the whole of who she was
is continually making a growing impression on me.
And I'd want to get at that somehow .
And Charles Olson wasn't, he was,
I don't know that he ever had much to say about Dickinson.
And I'm hesitant to speak for him here.
I mean I can read some connections there
but I don't know that he would have agreed.
Yes.
Yes in the red shirt.
Do we have copies of her manuscripts--
[INAUDIBLE]
We have her manuscripts and handwriting,
but it's a very good and very curious
question as to what editing they show.
No we don't generally have first draft, second drafts
and that kind of thing.
What we have is sometimes notes on the side of her manuscripts
with possible substitute words, possible questioning
of certain words.
And there are people who I think have gone so far or at least
are attempting to go so far as to do dating scientifically
of the ink in there to find out is that note on the side,
is it a later note.
You know that makes you think she might have changed it
to that, or is it a contemporary note
to the original manuscript?
Making you think she hadn't quite made up her mind yet
and it could be a couple of things.
And that is, of course, one of the things
that the reader's editions of her work
actually don't represent very well.
And you either have to go to very expensive editions
or to the manuscript.
And you can buy I think a two or three volume
set of her manuscript editions for I think it's about $200
or so.
Yes.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well I think if you look at the ones
I showed I think are mostly highly polished poems,
however if you read through all of her manuscripts
you and I might have differing ideas about which we thought
were sketches and which we thought were highly polished.
She did not want her work saved, but it was saved.
On the other hand, she had sewn something
like maybe somebody knows better than I do.
Of the 1700s something poems like 1,600 or so of them
had been sewn into little pamphlets or call fascicles.
Were these just matters of convenience to sew them?
Were they grouped in purposeful ways?
These are things scholars are still thinking about.
There are a lot of open questions.
Yes.
Talking about the significance of capitalization
on certain things--
[INAUDIBLE]
This is my idiosyncratic opinion.
It is that it is idiosyncratic.
And that while once in a while you might think some nouns
and things are capitalized, it's not that consistent.
And there are certain poems in which I read in her manuscripts
and it's hard for me to tell if she intended a capital
letter here or there.
There may be somebody here who has more experience with that
specifically than I do.
But is there anyone that feels like there's
a system of capitalization?
I've not heard that proposed by anyone.
But it is a question that every time I
teach Dickinson it is asked.
And I just have to say that it seems quite idiosyncratic to me
and the question of whether, if she had been an entirely
different person and had decided to edit these for publication
in her time would she have changed it?
We don't know.
And we can't know?
Yes.
Was she independently wealthy?
Or did she wait tables or drive a taxi?
Or how did she keep herself--
Didn't you get my point?
She was a dancer.
No.
Actually, her family had been quite wealthy.
Her grandfather basically lost all the family fortune
in really bad railway investments.
Railway it was a big thing but he
invested in the railway going to places
that just didn't make sense.
And her father did earn, actually
they gave up the traditional family house
but her father earned enough back they bought that back.
And he was a prominent attorney and so
they were, not as wealthy as the family had been at some point.
And she basically worked in the house cooking, keeping it warm,
taking care of others until she was somewhat older.
So neither terribly poor or fantastically
wealthy in her lifetime.
Yes I keep looking at you and hoping you're nodding at things
I'm saying because I know you know a lot about this.
[INAUDIBLE]
Thank you, Susan.
[APPLAUSE]
Boy after that nice comment I really want to stop and say
go get some food out there and drink.
Thank you very much.
OK thank you.
[APPLAUSE]