"Of rhythm is image.
Of image is knowing.
Of knowing, there is a construct."
That is Charles Olson one of the great New England
poets of the 20th century thinking about all of poetry.
"Begin with rhythm.
Words move.
Syllables move, or juxtapose in beauty.
From such juxtapositions, images always so
valued in poetry, which make us see, which makes us think.
To think to have an idea that comes out of seeing
is to work toward knowledge towards knowing.
And after we know one thing, even
if we are always questioning it, we begin to know others.
And before long we have concepts, constructs,
systems of knowing.
Already the movement from ear to eye to mind feels like a dance.
Move your feet.
Move your eyes.
Move your head.
Move your mind."
Emily Dickinson moves all of these and more.
Dickinson's particular syllabic juxtaposition in beauty
is a dance, is the melopoeia Ezra Pound speaks
about when he speaks about three ways in which poetry works.
Her dazzling images or her dance with light
among the things of her world provides the phanopoeia which
is another of those three.
And her dance with ideas including
with the idea of possibility and the idea of God
provides the logopoeia, which Pound
defines as the dance of the intellect among words.
One could almost think that latter day poetic thinkers,
such as Pound and Olson, built their definitions,
their poetics, out of the work of Dickinson.
It would be possible.
In fact while they probably almost certainly did not,
they did have among others Shakespeare in mind.
And in recent readings of Shakespeare--
and I'm teaching a class on Shakespeare right now--
in rhythm and diction I am reminded
of no one so much as Dickinson.
I've been in love with Dickinson's poems
for a very long time.
In fact, my first college lecture
as a teaching assistant before some 200 freshman students
was on Dickinson's particular dance.
So I haven't come very far in 30 years.
But she has not failed me yet.
And I hope I do not fail her.
In trying to keep to the metaphor of dance,
please remember that in all the poems
I will address the initial dance that of rhythm is unavoidable.
I will address it specifically in some of these poems,
but not in all.
It is a dance of regular rhythm, but not quite.
Because it is a dance of interruption.
The great disservice of early editors of Dickinson
was to believe that poems should have smooth and silky even
lilting rhythms and to remove her long dashes,
her odd capitalizations that specifically give Dickinson's
work its interruptive quality.
A poem interrupts her.
She interrupts the world.
And our reading should be alarming.
After all this is the poet who said
she knew something was a poem when it took her head off.
So please in your continuing readings of Dickinson
and she is a poet to be--
[NO AUDIO]
Test.
OK.
OK, so as you continue to read her,
I hate to say this, but get rid of your books that are editions
of her poems edited by her family
members and other 19th century editors, which
are still repeatedly published and made available.
And look for the editions edited either
by Thomas H Johnson, who did a tremendous service to her work
in 1955, or R.W. Franklin, who improved upon Johnson,
but only slightly in 1999.
But while you're at it, at least look a little bit
at the manuscript pages of Dickinson.
You can find them online at least some of them.
And look at Susan Howe's amazing book
My Emily Dickinson for a superb argument
against the editing of Dickinson at all.
You might say this is too much to ask
of an audience that simply wants to read
the work of a great poet.
I think, though, that if the poet is as great as this one
is, it's worth the trouble.
Let's begin with her particular dance
in place, her particular place among its flora and fauna.
Here's a small early poem number 19 in Johnson's edition.
"A sepal, a petal, and a thorn upon a common summer's
morn, a flask of dew, a bee or two,
a breeze, a caper in the trees, and I'm a rose."
There's one word in this entire poem
I would call commentary i.e.
that isn't directly related to showing an image.
Rather it says something about an image.
And that is the word common.
But even that contributes to what we see and feel,
common summer's mourn.
Every other word that's not a thing or a slight modifier,
like summer's, is a pointer, a delineated, a positioner, A,
and, of, upon, in the.
The images aren't drawn out.
They are simple, and yet they are parts of a whole.
And not until the end of a sort of complete image
that is put together and even anthropomorphized, I'm a rose.
But not really even anthropomorphize,
for I don't hear the poet speaking here is the I,
rather hear the poet letting the natural object speak.
And it's a glorious exclamation.
It's as if a human had said, a leg, skin, an arm,
walking on the common hill.
A rope of sweat, a fly around cooled by breeze
among the trees.
I am.
And in so doing the rose takes shape
not as something for humans, but as something fully
of and for itself.
Dickinson honors the natural world
more than she makes use of it.
Images in poems are almost always visual images.
But here they are much more.
We see, petal.
We feel, thorn and breeze.
We taste dew in a flask.
We have a kind of proprioceptive sense
of what is around the body.
The bee buzzing.
Our fullness as readers is evoked bit by bit
just as the fullness of the flower
comes to be manifest before us.
And what of music here?
Dickinson while using common rhythms
also cast them away through diction, punctuation,
capitalization, and pacing.
So I don't think we should read a sepal, pedal and a thorn
in that simple iambic flow, but rather follow the energy.
A sepal a petal happening quickly before us,
small and quiet, then we pause at the comma and thrust
to the end of the line, and a thorn.
Think of a bugle.
[SINGING]
Don't get caught up in how you think
poems are supposed to scan, rather
follow the poet's language.
After the blast, we relax into the second line
then play as we drink and as bees cavort in the third lines
flask and buzz.
And of course buzz is a word never used yet
we find a similar sound in breeze.
Which rather completes the line above,
as we are moving a caper in the trees,
with caper recalling sepal in its accents and mid-consonant.
And even the vowels around that consonant,
while trees recalls breeze.
So that overall the simple phrase "a caper in the trees"
has sound-wise recapitulated the entire poem up to that point.
Then the third of Dickinson's famous long dashes
giving more of a pause than a comma or period or semicolon
when occurring midline.
And at the ends of lines more than a line break.
It's a breath, I think, and an exhalation.
Yet here a rising exclamation, "and I'm
a rose," which may also be a pun,
and I am a rose or I am arisen.
So that the birth of the flower in its own consciousness
is a spiritual rebirth, a resurrection that
happens each spring.
As you read it again on your own, feel your own sepals,
petals, and thorns, drink your dew,
enjoy the buzzing, the cool breeze,
the dazzle of the forest around you, raise your arms
and call forth your own being.
This is being alive.
This is being in the world.
We've been having ongoing conversations
for the last week or two with the poet in New York about just
how sexy Emily Dickinson is so.