For many days I have been in the thickets of Emily Dickinson by way of a very thick biography. My friend Maria said she was told by a teacher: all women poets must confront Dickinson eventually. Now I understand this. I don't know why I didn't pay her more heed in my youth.



What entices me is ED's clear sense of election: her faith in her own poetry, that "this is my job to do"--though no one ever told her anything she wrote was worth a damn. When she briefly went off to Mount Holyoke the college was run by a Miss Lyons, who gave her the injunction: "Never write a foolish thing in a letter or elsewhere; 'what is written is written.'"



I have been thinking much about this because, as I prepare to move, I've been looking over old journals and pondering whether to burn them, as the writing contained in them is quite embarrassing. I don't know that I ever strove, as a daily act of living--instead I was the good-time girl. Possibly, historically, there are good writers who were good-time girls but I think not many. Think Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St Vincent Millay. They come to sad ends.



Every time I go through Dickinson I find something really great though, like this here #1010:



Crumbling is not an instant's Act

A fundamental pause

Dilapidation's processes

Are organized Decays -



'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul

A Cuticle of Dust

A Borer in the Axis

An Elemental Rust -



Ruin is formal - Devil's work

Consecutive and slow -

Fall in an instant, no man did

Slipping - is Crashe's law -



Well this is not a consistently true theorem but it seems applicable to chronic illness. I asked Maria, who is also a poet, why we didn't go the route of Emily Dickinson. Maria said: Because we wanted to have sex!



And therein was our ruin.