THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2010 BOOK WORLD
The poems of Emily Dickinson, handled with care by a fine analyst
by Michael Dirda
inson’s poetry. But the reason to consider buying “Dickinson: Se- lected Poems and Commentar- ies” lies, of course, in the com- mentator, Helen Vendler. Vendler — A. Kingsley Porter
A
University Professor at Harvard — is widely regarded as our fin- est living critic and champion of contemporary poetry. Many would say of poetry, period, since she has produced important studies of half the Western can- on, from Shakespeare’s sonnets and George Herbert’s metaphys- ical verse to the work of Keats, Whitman, Yeats, Stevens, Plath, Heaney and Ashbery. Vendler’s sheer appetite for poetry and her explicatory power are phenom- enal.
She is, however, a thoroughly serious, academic critic. Now, some professors are fun to read: Think of the cool Olympian clar- ity of Northrop Frye, the aston- ishing encyclopedism of Hugh Kenner, the delicious precisions of Guy Davenport, the Empso- nian dash and brilliance of Chris- topher Ricks. Vendler’s strength, meanwhile, lies in clearly, pa- tiently explaining what’s hap- pening in a poem. But — and it’s abig but — you really do need to pay attention. As Vendler writes in her introduction to “Dickin- son,” hers isn’t so much a book to read through as “a book to be browsed in, as the reader be- comes interested in one or an- other of the poems commented on here.”
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
left nearly 1,800 poems. “In some passionate years,” notes Vendler, “she wrote almost a poem a day.” Dickinson never mar- ried — “Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty” — and to all appearances seemed just a shy, reclusive spinster, a good Chris- tian woman residing quietly in Amherst, Mass. But her inner life was quite different, hardly Christian and not at all conventional. In the view of eminent critic Harold Bloom, Dickinson’s was simply “the best mind to ap- pear among Western poets in nearly four centuries.” Yet, aside from the handful of poems that appeared anonymously in local news- papers, she never published her work. Most of it survives either in manuscripts or from tran- scriptions in letters, mainly to her family. When first brought out in book form, her generally short, gnomic verses were often regularized. Words were altered when their meaning was deemed
ny good bookstore is likely to offer a half-dozen differ- ent editions of Emily Dick-
resurrected Soul) and the Breeze (the Spirit) all fit that criterion.” While Vendler’s readings are
generally clear and persuasive, some are not. In discussing “A Clock Stopped,” she spends a confusing paragraph on the movement of a clock’s hour hand, positing a “circle” of 120 “Degrees” and a clock face marked out in increments of 10 spaces. This isn’t any kind of timepiece I have ever seen. In an- other poem she explains Dickin- son’s use of the noun “Ought” as her “customary spelling of ‘Aught,’ meaning ‘Anything.’ ” Okay. But in a poem that begins “The Zeros taught,” it does seem possible that “Ought” might ac- tually mean zero, as in the phrase “nineteen ought two.” Vendler also has a tendency to
FROM "THE WORLD OF EMILY DICKINSON”
THE SECRET POET: Emily Dickinson seems to be just a shy, reclusive spinster, but her inner life was quite different.
puzzling or sacrilegious, and Dickinson’s beloved dashes, her preferred form of punctuation, were frequently changed to com- mas or periods. Only in 1955 did Thomas Johnson produce a scholarly edition that printed the earliest fair copy of what Dickin- son actually wrote. His were the standard texts until Ralph Franklin’s 1998 “Vario- rum Edition,” which chose Dickinson’s last revised versions as its copy-texts but also in- cluded the manuscript variants.
Such bibliographic
DICKINSON Selected Poems and Commentaries By Helen Vendler Harvard Univ. 535 pp. $35
details matter because, like Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden, Dick- inson frequently fid- dled with and re- worked her seemingly finished poems. Ven- dler relies on Franklin for her texts, but notes that sometimes the po-
et’s rejected first versions, found in Johnson, display a raw power all their own. For instance, the line “And this brief Tragedy of Flesh” was slightly altered in meaning and distinctly weak- ened to “this brief Drama in the flesh.” The first sounds grandly Shakespearean, the second merely descriptive. Dickinson’s poetry, summariz-
es Vendler, is “epigrammatic, terse, abrupt, surprising, unset- tling, flirtatious, savage, win- some, metaphysical, provocative, blasphemous, tragic, funny.” As many readers know, her opening lines are especially startling: “One need not be a Chamber —
to be Haunted — ” “Wild Nights — Wild Nights!” “After great pain, a formal feel- ing comes — ”
“Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me”
Gun — ”
“My Life had stood — a Loaded “Crumbling is not an instant’s
Act” “Tell all the truth but tell it slant — ”
Dickinson famously called one of her poems “my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me,” and occasionally she sounds as personal as a diary, but more of- ten she pares her lines until they are as ambiguous and richly compacted as a Zen koan. Take this blasphemous little poem, as Vendler calls it: “In name of the Bee — / And of the Butterfly — / And of the Breeze — Amen!” While this invocation naturalizes the Trinitarian formula of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, it doesn’t wholly abandon it. Dickinson is careful that her nouns are “sym- bolic as well as ‘real’; the Bee (for Being), the Butterfly (Psyche, the
connect Dickinson’s language to that of earlier (and later) poets or to the Bible, sometimes without adequate evidence and purpose. Take the poem “It’s easy to invent a Life”: Here the word “thrifty” leads her to cite Hamlet’s phrase “Thrift, thrift, Horatio” — for no reason I can discern — while the poem’s reference to “Perished Patterns” somehow calls up the phrase “so various, so beautiful, so new” from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” This, in its turn, is followed by a nod to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s use of the word “haecceitas,” referring to an entity’s individual “thisness,” which, Vendler reminds us, he borrowed from the medieval phi- losopher Duns Scotus. All this quote-mongering seems to be lit- tle more than the kind of free as- sociation that all great readers — and many classroom teachers — are prone to. For Vendler really is a great reader and teacher. Consider her superb analysis — too long to re- produce — of “Essential Oils — are wrung.” Or look at her dis- cussion of the famous poem about heaven “I never saw a Moor”: She points out that its last lines (“Yet certain am I of the spot / As if the Checks were giv- en — ”) refer to train tickets, thus making Paradise nearby, just a few stops down the line from Amherst. Older editors had emended “checks” to “chart,” thus losing the homely simile. Again, in her glossing of “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,” Vendler neatly picks apart Dickinson’s verbal games with the article “a” and the number “one.”
Emily Dickinson is certainly
never going to be an easy poet to understand, but her dense, poignant lyrics are now a lot more accessible to ordinary read- ers thanks to Vendler’s unrav- elings. If you’re going to read Dickinson, this “selected poems and commentary” is the place to start.
bookworld@washpost.com
Visit Dirda’s online book discussion at
washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
NICK GALIFIANAKIS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Dear Carolyn: Is there such thing as too
sensitive? I rolled my eyes out of frustration when I realized my girlfriend was going to do things her way no matter what I said. It hurt her feelings. I reluctantly apologized, but we had to have “the talk” for a week. If I show the slightest frustration or annoyance with her, she gets upset, cries and expects an immediate apology. I think the relationship is doomed and told her so.
Minneapolis
Not sure there’s a question here, but I won’t let that stop me. Yes, you did ask if there’s
“such thing as too sensitive,” but that doesn’t count because you clearly think there is. Besides, there’s no need for
anyone to be at fault here — an idea both of you urgently need to embrace. What you’ve described is an unspoken competition for Most Aggrieved. “If I so much as twitch in a frowny direction, she cries!” “He’s got this huffy attitude with me all the time, but refuses to admit it!” (Two words: “reluctantly apologized.”) Right now you’re both looking for behaviors in each other that prove you’re the righteous one, and, really, has anyone looking to justify him/ herself ever not succeeded at it?
People have their
comfortable ways of expressing emotion, and not all ways are compatible. It could be that you’re just not suited to each other; most people aren’t.
KLMNO
R
C3
CAROLYN HAX
He rolled his eyes; she narrowed hers
Adapted from a recent online discussion:
But it could also be that
you’re so far up in each other’s business that you’ve forgotten how just to be yourselves. For the next week, see if she’ll agree to having both of you let everything go. Decide upfront: “This is how s/he is and it’s not a referendum on me.” If you can go a week without taking each other’s each-other- ness personally, then you might actually start to see the outline of the people you fell in love with. Or, not. But then we can all say we tried, right?
Re: Minneapolis: Don’t roll your eyes at other people. It’s dismissive and communicates underlying contempt. I used to do it, and one day realized it’s a profoundly immature way to express oneself. If you have something to say, then have the courage to say it. If it’s better kept under your hat, keep it there. It’s irrelevant whether the recipient of your eye-roll reacts badly; YOU are communicating a lack of respect for that person when you do it. Is that the person you want to be?
Anonymous So good it belongs in a frame.
Re: Eye-rolling: If I’m getting periodic (angry)
eye-rolls, I can understand that I should say something. But, will it do any good to point out that the person is being disrespectful, or does he have to figure this out on his own? It’s my husband, he didn’t used to be like this, and I really don’t want the kids to think this is an
appropriate way to treat others. Anonymous 2
“If there’s something you’d
like to say, then please show me the courtesy of saying it.” Calm as can be. You’ll show your kids that eye-rolling stinks, which is really important, and you’ll show them what it looks and sounds like to stand up for yourself. Really really important.
Read the whole transcript or join the discussion live
at noon Fridays on www.
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Write to Tell Me About It, Style, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or tellme@washpost. com.
Pacifica Radio may air Al Jazeera on 5 U.S. stations
WPFW-FM in D.C. is among them; some see loss of financial support
by Paul Farhi
Pacifica Radio, the nonprofit organization that runs the na- tion’s oldest public-radio net- work, is in talks with the Al Ja- zeera Network to put the Persian Gulf-based news service on its five stations, including WPFW- FM in Washington.
If an agreement is reached, Pa-
cifica would become the biggest American broadcaster to air Al Jazeera, whose news reports have at times drawn criticism from Western governments, in- cluding the Bush administration during the early days of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Al Ja- zeera is perhaps best known for being the first network to broad- cast video communiques from Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Pacifica’s parent organization,
the Pacifica Foundation in Berke- ley, Calif., has been negotiating with Doha-based Al Jazeera to carry the audio portion of its English-language TV channel, according to people familiar with the discussions. Closing a deal with Pacifica, which is known for its liberal- leaning programming, would be a boost for Al Jazeera. The net- work, owned by the emir of the
Persian Gulf state of Qatar, has struggled to gain a foothold in the American market. After four years of operation, Al Jazeera English can be seen only in the Washington area and two other cities, Burlington, Vt., and To- ledo, Ohio. The negotiations, which have not been disclosed publicly, are already drawing criticism from within Pacifica. In an internal memo to the organization’s na- tional board, Steve Brown, a for- mer member of the board over- seeing Pacifica-owned WBAI-FM in New York, advised Pacifica to consider “the blowback” from as- sociating itself with Al Jazeera. “Al Jazeera is a totally govern- ment owned and funded broad- cast entity,” Brown wrote. “It claims to be independent and un- biased, but what broadcast entity can afford to bite the hand that feeds it (especially when that hand can also, literally as well as metaphorically, cut out its tongue)?”
Brown also criticized Qatar’s human-rights record and its treatment of women and politi- cal prisoners.
But the most critical issue, he said, was “the Jewish Question” — that is, the reaction of Pacifi- ca’s Jewish listeners and finan- cial contributers to airing a net- work funded by the head of an Arabic state. “It is not even sur- mise, but an absolute certainty, that if we broadcast Al Jazeera . . . support from many and per- haps most of our Jewish listeners
could vanish overnight.” While Brown conceded he
didn’t know the religious affilia- tion of Pacifica’s donors, he wrote that the loss of support from a fraction could damage Pacifica. “Could we survive without hav- ing to sell off a station?” he wrote.
Brown did not return calls seeking comment on Wednesday. Arlene Engelhardt, Pacifica’s
executive director, declined to comment on any negotiations. But she spoke favorably of Al Ja- zeera, saying, “I appreciate the viewpoints they bring and see them as offering an international perspective that our news media doesn’t always offer.” In addition to WPFW in Wash-
ington, Pacifica operates stations in New York, Los Angeles, Hous- ton and Berkeley. Some of its news and commentary pro- grams, such as “Democracy Now!,” are carried on about 100 affiliated stations. Pacifica was founded in 1947 by pacifists and conscientious objectors. Its mission statement declares that it will use its radio assets “to engage in any activity that shall contribute to a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and col- ors [and] to gather and dissemi- nate information on the causes of conflict between any and all of such groups.”
farhip@washpost.com
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