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.

I found the Bishop poem--what I didn't have was the shape of the poem, which is the key to its structure. It's stunning how rapidly things will lose their currency in our culture--the Hemans poem circulating for more than a hundred years, then poof: it's gone.



Casabianca



Love's the boy stood on the burning deck

trying to recite "The boy stood on

the burning deck." Love's the son

stood stammering elocution

while the poor ship in flames went down.



Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,

even the swimming sailors, who

would like a schoolroom platform, too,

or an excuse to stay

on deck. And love's the burning boy.





I don't see how I could have forgotten a few key words: elocution, obstinate.

Last night, I read an amazing Richard Powers' essay in the new Pushcart volume about how computers will affect books and the narrative in general--some lab has created a program that can produce quite effective and genuine and even autonomous characters and plots. I don't quite know what to make of it all--both the essay and the cyber-world. Am I turning my back on the real one? Or the book one? By wasting time with the blog.



But I must say there is a serendipity that comes with all this information overload. In regards to my brain's limited storage capacity, for example, I have always tried to hold there Elizabeth Bishop's poem Casabianca, which I think I know by heart, and as I don't have her book at hand I'll type it out as well as I can remember:



Love's the boy stood on the deck trying to recite

"The boy stood on the burning deck."

Love's the boy stood on the deck while the whole

proud ship in flames went down.



Love's the boy, the burning ship and even the swimming sailors who

would love to have a schoolroom platform too

or any excuse to stay on deck.

And love's the burning boy.



Since I typed that from memory, the line breaks are probably all wrong, as well as other glitches. But I always loved that poem and never knew what it meant, until the other day when Garrison Keillor e-mailed me his chosen poem for the day. It's long, but here's the beginning of it, by Felicia Dorothea Hemans.



Casabianca



The boy stood on the burning deck

Whence all but he had fled;

The flame that lit the battle's wreck

Shone round him o'er the dead.



Yet beautiful and bright he stood,

As born to rule the storm;

A creature of heroic blood,

A proud, though childlike form.





FDH lived 1793-1835: don't know if I'll research her more than that. But at last the mystery is solved.



Also the other day I found out who Gaspara Stampa was (a 16th century Italian writer of sonnets.) Her name figured into a contemporary poem I used to like, and use in class, but I can't remember much more about it than that it included a line about having "hands like eggbeaters." If anyone knows where that line comes from, let me know.

Partly why I remain a renegade of the blogosphere is that I've not yet learned my Milton, not only "When I Consider How My Light Was Spent" but his bang-up "On the Late Massacre of the Piedmontese." You must learn these if you're is going to spend any time on line at the Post Office, me having never been much good for toting something like a book. And I got hung up on Milton as a result of having gotten hung up on swimming, long story, hole in body, surgery etc.



So now my skin has been remade entire, and I plan to swim as soon as the slush melts, tomorrow maybe. But in this week of holing up I've been thinking about my essay on birds, the one that exists 92% in my head. Emily Dickinson's going to be in it, and whipping through her each time I always find a lot of poems that are new. This time I also got a sense of the sweep of the work: as far as birds go, and she goes far, her work seems to utilize them a lot at its beginnings, and then she moves to more metaphysical subject matter, which makes sense, if we accept the myth that she became more and more agoraphobic--windows will only take you so far. This is sad, to contemplate how the physical constraints of a life also control its artistic production, and it was in protest of this idea that I decided, this fall, to keep track of the birds as they migrate in and out of town (would have been a better idea last winter, when the weather was fair...)



A couple of days ago in the freak storm we did go look off the point, where the ducks were huddled in the bay. Very close and still, immobile.



It's clear that Dickinson equates her poetic gift with bird song, and toward the end of her life she knows she's shutting down (from the whirlwind years of her younger adulthood.) Here is a good short one, #1478:



One note from One Bird

Is better than a Million Word -

A scabbard has - but one sword



I guess this is sad: her self-knowledge of her own winding down. It is the subject of #1089:



The Opening and the Close

Of Being, are alike

Or differ, if they do,

As Bloom opon a Stalk-



That from an equal Seed

Unto an equal Bud

Go parallel, perfected

In that they have decayed -

Vivian has been pestering me again, so I thought I'd type another poem. I have been thinking about poetry and patronage lately, and in my research came across the fact that Teddy Roosevelt did provide a stipend to E.A. Robinson after reading his first book--Robinson just had to show up: he read the paper and left it on the chair of his office at a NY customs house, to show he'd been there.



I also unearthed the fact that no Republicans have--is commissioned the right word?--well, given audience to an inaugural poem. At least of late. Kennedy famously had Robert Frost read "The Gift Outright," which is a loathsome poem I think (I don't want to memorize that one though perhaps I should, so I can drag it out whenever I want to prove my point about how poetry and politics do not mix usually, either for the purposes of the left or for the right and that goes for antiwar poems too.) Clinton had first Maya Angelou then Miller Williams (father of Lucinda) concoct poems for his inaugurals. Carter had James Dickey (must research what that wild man wrote.)



But no poems for Bush. And now he has been burned reciprocally by the poets. I've been wondering why it is exactly that poetry aligns itself with the left. Is it because, being not a profit-making endeavor, poetry lies outside the capitalist loop, and is therefore threatening?

There is more to it that I have to think through.



Okay but back to Robinson: I've known "Richard Cory" forever, because it was a Simon and Garfunkel song. His morals are simple, but that is the charm of the poems: they position themselves so opposite the cerebral calisthenics that T.S. Eliot was doing in those same years. The other day though I also found this one which has echoed with me.



Reuben Bright



Because he was a butcher and thereby

did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;



For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.



And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter house.





That's it: quite simple. But it makes me wish for rhyming poetry again, and yet when poets do rhyme these days, it (the poem) is usually like a businessman trying to hold a barn-raising or driving around in his model T on Sundays, everything so forced and corny. Rhyme is something we cannot go back to, at least not in the Reuben Bright way. This makes the poem so doubly sad. I don't have any solution.

Vivian says I have to blog, so all right already. I have not memorized Plath or Milton; in fact I had forgotten about them, having fallen off the improve-my-gray-matter track of late. What happened was that my van burst into flames, and Jim dragged me out and I survived, but I was not particularly grateful. People think you are a soresport if you make this kind of remark, and by way of reply I'll just post Tony Hoagland's poem.



Suicide Song



But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself

Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge



At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea

Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope



But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way

And I am too knowledgable now to hurt people imprecisely



No longer do I live by the law of me

No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness



And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude

for sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated



Pickles they place at the edge of your plate

Killing yourself is wasteful like spilling oil



At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given

And anyway, who has clothes nice enough



To be caught dead in? You stay alive you stupid asshole

Because you haven't been excused



You haven't finished though it takes a stubborn appetite

To chew this food



It is a stone it is an inconvenience it is an innocence

And I turn against it like a record



Turns against the needle

That makes it play.





Poet Hayden Carruth wrote an essay about his suicide attempt--I think he later renounced the piece--in which he speaks of being granted time out of time by his survival (and I was never sure of what he meant by this.) However, I noticed that I was not possessed of a light-heartedness by my survival, the cathartic voltage of the saved. So there must be something wrong with me, I guess, though the value-assessment of life does change (and even our culture's insistence that you make an appropriate assessment) when you're one of the afflicted. You're half let off the hook, but only half--you still have to be a trouper.



And being a trouper I actually find more fun. Things keep happening. We rode our kayaks in the bay the other day and it was all bash bash bash saltwater in the face, our dinky bay more rough than I have ever seen and I am glad to have been so roughly handled by it. Too small to ever disappear like a speck, though last year a young man did--his canoe found but never him.



But I also was a party to the poem's ingrateful oil spill, as a full tank from my VW van leaked out and burned. Closed traffic on the main drag. In this way it was like a parade, a holiday.

I did find the Collins essay, "My Grandfather's Tackle Box." Are we to feel guilty for using our lives in our poems? I always proceeded on the assumption that I had the freedom to use my life, though it was never my life, was my mythical life. Anyway, a propos this topic, I thought I ought to memorize Milton's poem on his blindness, so that maybe it will teach me to quit obsessing on all those lives I should have had, the lives I think I want better than this one, the lives that thus occlude this one, with all its riches.



When I Consider How My Light Is Spent



When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my sould more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide:

"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"

I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait."



Well I cannot exactly stand, and don't exactly believe, but the lesson is well-taken.