Handcuffed to Emily Dickinson
Fine, here’s your essay on Emily Dickinson. She was a good poet. She was born sometime in the 1800s, or maybe the 1900s. I’m not sure. I’ve looked up several articles about her on my own free will, and not because you, Mr. Larner, and our librarian double threatened us with a bad-cop, bad-cop routine by staking 50% of this grade on the citations we used — thank you, by the way.
Emily Dickinson ate breakfast every morning —
You know what the worst part about all of this is? I actually like Emily Dickinson. Turns out, she’s a great poet because of how she uses lines, you know, these things “ — ”, since it keeps the text moving. It’s like when you’re talking to a friend and you’re ranting about something and but you haven’t gotten to the worst detail yet, and when you do — wham — you grab them by the arm and you drive the nail in the coffin. You tell them that even though Janeen keeps bringing me up when she’s talking to Haneul in a sick psychological power grab because she knows I like him and she’s trying to establish dominance — it’s that it doesn’t even matter because Haneul is too oblivious to see this power move happening which makes me not even like him as much and now I’ve wasted three years of my life.
That’s why she’s a good poet.
Here is the version that I think you want to hear: Emily Dickinson’s bold use of syntax allows her to connect ideas at a fast and oh my god I’m so bored her syntax lets her pivot between ideas quickly. Or leave things open ended. Or change the way you read her poems. It’s great. She popularized this technique in an otherwise stale world of poetry.
Why are we pretending to be people we’re not? What, are we drinking scotch and twirling our mustaches and saying “oh, yes, quite” until one of us turns to dust? I am sixteen. You are — look, I don’t want to be rude — you are a person who likes The Beatles. I am not an academic. I am not a scholar. And I would like to remind you that this rubric is going to judge me based on my mastery of formal language and thirty minutes later, I will be in the gymnasium, and will be judged on how enthusiastically I throw and catch dodgeballs.
This system is arbitrary. Taco Tuesday exists here. Nothing is real.
There was one day where we almost understood each other. It was when we were supposed to be doing research but everyone was on their phones? You pulled me aside and gave me back my last essay and said “this was too informal”, and then everyone stopped talking because they wanted to hear what was going on.
I asked you why I had to write formally in the first place, and you replied that it’s because we were writing for an academic audience. I replied that I didn’t want an academic audience and then you dodged that question and said that this was the style that everyone wrote in for college. Then Janeen added that formal writing often helps us organize our own thoughts in a preset structure and then you thanked her — do you remember that day? When I lost all hope in humanity?
I do not want to write for academics. No. Every academic essay I’ve read is the exact same thing. The writer will take a normal world, like “space” and then capitalize it, redefine it, and suddenly you have your essay.
What is Space in the context of Emily Dickinson? Is it simply the Space she places physically between her lines (the starting and stopping leaving the true meanings of her poems to be derived in the pauses) or rather is Space the physical room in which you read her poems? I will define Space as the absence of Matter. And I will define Matter as the poetic substance which relates the writer to the reader.
Then you compare Matter to life and Space to death, write thirty more pages, and read this in a conference where all the professors in the room with oversized suits will react with solemn and understanding mmm’s, and to put it into your terms, these are the same mmm’s that, once collected, will form the pallets and scaffolding of an alter that holds the words “tenure bound” in beautiful apathetic glory.
I want to write for my friends. For me. For people who enjoy reading whatever it is I’m writing about. Pretending to be someone I’m not was what we were warned about in our start-of-year assembly, and trust me, I loved sitting in the same direction as 400 other kids as we all watched our principal pop out of a giant bobcat mascot and lecture us about authenticity.
I’m staring at this rubric right now and there’s a lot that I’m missing. Specifically, there’s a lot of quoting I haven’t done so I’m going to get that out of the way here.
Poetry, in a large sense, is “descriptive” (Caruthers, 233). In other terms, which can also be described as paraphrasing, poetry is not as structured as novels. A short, in-line quote that illustrates this point from the poem “Because I could not stop for Death” is “For only Gossamer, my Gown –”, whereas a longer block quote illustrating this point, excuse me, highlighting this idea, can be found here:
We slowly drove — He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility — (5–8)
Additionally, her transitions are quite interesting. Furthermore, these transitions are sometimes non-sequiturs. However, this does not mean that her transitions are disjointed.
Now that that’s out of the way, I want to tell you, genuinely, why I like her rhyme scheme. “Away” does not rhyme with “Civility”. Not unless you try really hard and say “Civilit-aaaaeyy” like you’re a Soundcloud rapper.
But, the reason why this is effective, is because it makes you re-examine things. If you’re riding with death in a carriage, things are not normal. It should make you viscerally uncomfortable every time you hit what’s supposed to be a rhyme, and instead you’re left with something different, and something unsettling.
For example, let’s say you’re hanging out at the mall and suddenly you see Janeen put her hand on Haneul’s leg. This is wildly upsetting, one because clearly there’s no right or wrong in this world, and two because I can’t help but care and keep my eyes glued to this situation. Now, if you write a poem about this encounter, there’s no way you can rhyme “leg” with “egg”, okay? Here is the perfect opportunity to rhyme “leg” with “bag”, as in, “I want to shove Janeen into a garbage bag but also I am upset at my own rage and want to shove myself into a garbage bag”.
I know this essay’s a little all over the place. It has certainly occurred that yes, it could benefit from some sort of structure, but, and I know I run the risk of exaggerating — don’t you feel more alive? Doesn’t this feel more real? Like we’re actually talking with one another?
I think that if Emily Dickinson read this essay, I think she would like it. Not on the first read through. I think at first, she’d be scandalized by the language and we’d have to hang out a few times before she really got it.
In one of her letters she wrote “It seems as if Death which all so dread because it launches us upon an unknown world would be a relief to so endless a state of existence”. Dude. Same. High school is miserable. Writing helps because in those short moments, we have control over what gets put down on the page. And then she and I would talk, comfortably and casually, until we understood each other.
She was born in 1830. Please let me pass. I calculated it last night I need at least an 80 for an A.
