Emily wars

Emily Dickinson a lightning rod?

Some people sure seem to think so. Hard to believe in some ways, for a quiet 19th century woman who wanted nothing more than to take care of her invalid mother, cultivate beauty in the persons of flowers in her garden, and retreat to her room to write the stuff of her heart in sometimes odd but powerful verse.

Emily wrote intensely on topics important in her life. In everybody’s lives. And though she’s been dead for over 120 years, she is still so amazingly current. A couple new books again this year analyze some aspect of Dickinsonian lore that want to get us closer to the poet. The latest one, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, was released just a month or so ago by a South African ED scholar. One review says the book ‘overturns the established assumptions about the poet’s life.‘ We all want to know more about her it seems.

So many want a little piece of the Emily legacy for their own. She’s big in women’s studies, American literature, world poetry, gardening, conflict management (sort of), nature study, and good old American history. In my own case, I’m a member of a writers’ group we call Emily’s Boys. (See www.emilysboys.com.) We had plenty of ideas for naming ourselves, but everything seemed to come back to Emily Dickinson. We talk about her often. I’ve referred to her in my own poetry as Mother.

She is an enigma that reaches out to us from a century past offering handwritten letters and poems that we know she never thought the public would see. But yet we have.

We’ve looked at her life through a magnifying glass that would, I am sure, have embarrassed the stockings off the girl. She was a very private person whose attention to detail in her various writings make her work a rich source of psychological and philosophical analysis. And she’s great to quote.

So it is with some puzzlement that I report a couple of guys I know who flat out hate the woman. Well, hate the poet, anyway.

The first guy is a Montana poet I met in Silver Gate, the little town at the northeast entrance to Yellowstone. He is a summer resident there, and wanted to hear nothing positive about Ms. Dickinson. For him, his poetry would meet its ultimate salvation if released in a mountain stream where his words could run free over the rocks. Emily was in another universe as far as he was concerned.

The other guy is a high school upperclassman friend of mine who I’ve admired through the years. He turned me on to Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon when we both were kids running forklifts at a local retail warehouse. He got into teaching too, and dedicated his career to inner city kids when he could have landed a different clientele in the suburbs. When he took off on Emily, he criticized her for pulling out of life and living in an ivory tower. Not the kind of source of energy he ever preferred.

For me, Emily continues as a kindred soul who I very much would have liked to have taken out for an ice cream. I would have liked to sit and hear her read her work and ask her a few questions about the craft. I would have loved to look at her ink-stained hands and into her deep, dark eyes to see what wonders made up the woman. I hear she was a red head. Heavens. And, yes, I’ve had a crush on her for years.

Emily Dickinson continues to be an inspiration and force in my life. She knew how to focus. She knew how to write. I owe her, as Mother, my own honest and authentic attempts to record true, good, and beautiful slices of life as seen from behind these, my very own, eyes.

Today’s elder idea: In the name of the Bee,

and of the Blossom,

and of the Breeze. Amen.

Emily Dickinson

Image credit: No idea. Downloaded 2002.