A New Order

I have a lot of reading to do! I just got two new books – “Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them,” edited by Cristanne Miller, and “The Letters of Emily Dickinson,” edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell.

I have the 1955 Johnson edition of the “complete poems” and the 1998 Franklin edition of the “complete poems” – and now I have a copy of the 2016 edition edited by Cristanne Miller.  

The interesting thing about this edition is that Miller adds the line “As She Preserved Them.” 

The preface begins this way: “This is the first edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems to present in easily readable form Dickinson’s own ordering of the poems she bound into forty handmade-booklets between 1858 and 1875.”

The poems are arranged in five sections:  The Fascicles (i.e., the booklets Dickinson created); Unbound Sheets; Loose Poems; Poems Transcribed by Others; Poems Not Retained.

The book cover flap for “The Letters of Emily Dickinson” states that the compilation is “the first collected edition of the poet’s correspondence since 1958.  It presents all 1,304 of her extant letters, along with the small number available from her correspondents.  Almost 300 are previously uncollected, including letters published after 1958, letters more recently discovered in manuscript, and more than 200 ‘letter-poems’ that Dickinson sent to correspondents without accompanying prose.”​

Reading through most of this will be a slow process, though, as for the rest of April, all of May, and the first week of June I’ll be working as a long-term sub at a local middle school.  I’m a retired principal, and a school principal friend of mine called to ask for help!  LOL – eventually I’ll get to it all! 

I’ll add, though, that on my recent trip out west and back, I was able to read “Emily Dickinson Friend and Neighbor,” a biography published in 1930 by Little Brown that was written by Macgregor Jenkins, a neighbor of Dickinson who lived nearby when he was a boy.  I’ll have info about that book in the coming days!