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Dash It All -- Part 3

11/23/2023

Part 1 is HERE. Part 2 is HERE.

NOTE: The mention of "#DickinsonDaily posts" refers to my daily posts on the social platform Counter Social.

Recent #DickinsonDaily posts have discussed the poet’s use of dashes. Yesterday I included a link to a site which shows how early publications of Dickinson’s poetry changed her punctuation – including the omission of dashes.

Hmm…I wondered if Dickinson ever used the word “dash” in any of her poems. The answer – no; however, she did use the word “punctuation” in one poem, “The Robin is a Gabriel,” & she used the word “punctuate” in “The Dying need but little, Dear.”

“The Dying need but little” is a brief but intensely poignant poem (BTW: In line 6, read “that one” as “that someone,” someone who will no longer perceive color and beauty in the rainbow).

I remember when my older sister died of cancer a few years ago, my wife & I sat with my brother-in-law in their darkened home as my sister lay in a bed, eyes closed, breathing heavily, with one simple but essential need – earbuds to listen to a podcast or music.

In the final hours, who knows if she even comprehended what she was hearing – but it was a “little” thing to make her comfortable – like a bit of water or a flower there to “punctuate the wall.”

Now that she is gone, it is difficult to perceive “color in the Rainbow.” In truth, there is a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains I pass every single day – it was her favorite view of the mountains on the way to and from my home – and I can’t help but think of her on a daily basis when I pass that panoramic view of the landscape.

I found an interesting site with an article that discusses “The Dying need but little, Dear,” and that essay includes this:

“Likewise ‘The Dying need but little, Dear’ (Fr1037) appears to be a sort of primer on the elements of mourning: a vase, a flower, a fan: It tells how to express sorrow and how to pity. The assurance (and coherence) of the syntax disintegrates in the second stanza, however, as the speaker confronts the problem of naming the experience. The last need of ‘The Dying’ turns out to be ‘Certainty that one / No color in the Rainbow / Perceive, when you are gone—.’ Parsable English, apparently, fails to house the self-contained experience of either mourner or Dying; nevertheless, the very ambiguity serves to merge the experience of the two. Who is the ‘one’? Who is ‘you’? Color leaches out of the Rainbow alike for both, and that recognition answers their common ‘need.’”

The site with this essay, "Emily Dickinson's Republic of Suffering," is HERE.

Also, take a look at the poem in Dickinson’s own handwriting. You can see that someone – probably an earlier publisher – added an “s” to the verb “perceive” in line 8. As a result, you’ll find versions of the poem in some books with “perceive,” and other versions in other books with the word “perceives.”

Fin.

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Dash It All -- Part 2

11/23/2023

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The other day, I wrote a plog (poetry blog) post on Emily Dickinson's use of the dash. That initial post is HERE; below is Part 2:

Yesterday I touched on Dickinson’s use of the dash, and one site I found stated, “Most of Emily Dickinson’s poetry contains anywhere from eight dashes, as seen in poem 269, which begins ‘Wild Nights — Wild Nights!’ to 48 dashes, as seen in poem 522, which starts with the line ‘I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—’”

I posted both the Franklin version of “I tie my Hat” – with 41 dashes – & the Johnson version – with 48 dashes (because of the inclusion of 5 additional lines) – but then I glanced through my Johnson version & saw that poem J430 “It would never be Common – more – I said –” included 60-plus dashes!

I don’t know if that’s the poem with the most dashes; I just happened to notice that it had quite a number of dashes as I flipped through the pages.

I did run a Google search on “What poem by Emily Dickinson includes the most dashes?” and though no specific answer/poem popped up – take a look at this site that shows “Percentage of Dash Reduction in Published Versions Compared to Originals”: Click HERE.

That’s right: Early publications of Dickinson’s poetry changed her punctuation (and spelling and capitalization and rhymes, etc.) – and in many cases they omitted most or all of her dashes.

On the site I linked above, click on the top banner option “Poems” (with the down-arrow), and you can see analyses of individual poems in the fascicle. For example, poem 1605 is “I felt a Funeral in my Brain.”

Then click on the colored tabs on the left (which name the various editions), and you can see line-by-line comparisons on how these early editions altered Dickinson’s punctuation.

Very cool (if you happen to be a Dickinson nerd like me). LOL).

Fin.

Part 1 is HERE; Part 3 is HERE.

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Dash It All -- Part 1

11/19/2023

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I make a daily post on Counter Social with trivia, facts, and poetry of Emily Dickinson (FYI: I joined Counter Social over a year ago when Melon Husk allowed for the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation on Twitter, now my EX; I deleted my account there and joined CoSo).

Here's the post from today, 11/19/23:
Two days ago, I posted “The Future never spoke,” and @Marc_T_Benedict replied, “Interesting on the page. The proliferation of dashes.”

I jokingly wrote back that Dickinson’s motto when writing poetry was, “Dash it all!”
Of course, that made me wonder which poem of hers contains the most dashes – so I ran a Google-search: Which poem by Dickinson contains the most dashes?

Well, no specific answer popped up, but I did find various commentaries on Dickinson and the dash – including one that states this:

“Most of Emily Dickinson’s poetry contains anywhere from eight dashes, as seen in poem 269, which begins ‘Wild Nights — Wild Nights!’ to 48 dashes, as seen in poem 522, which start with the line ‘I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—’”

The site is HERE.

Well, I checked “I tie my Hat – I crease my Shawl – “ and in the Franklin edition of Dickinson’s poems, it has 41 dashes. In the Johnson it has 48 dashes.

Why the difference? Well, the Franklin does include one dash at the end of Line 9 that is not in Johnson; however, the Johnson edition includes 5 lines (with 8 dashes) that do not appear in the Franklin version of the poem.

The Dickinson archive shows the poem in Dickinson’s handwriting through line 24 (“For their – sake – not for Ours –”) – and here’s what it says about the publication history of the poem – if you can make sense of it (BUT it does mention the “five other lines”):

FP (1929), 180, as six quatrains, without the final four lines (on h 157) and without the transposition. The lines were restored in Bingham, New England Quarterly, 20 (March 1947), 34-35, from transcripts of A (a tr344, 344d-f), with the transposition, and in Poems (1955), 341-43, from the holograph, without the transposition; both of these texts were preceded by five other lines on h 157 belonging to "A pit but heaven over it"; CP (1960), 212-13, without the transposition, with the five other lines. The text was established in Franklin, Harvard Library Bulletin, 28 (July 1980), 245-57. MB (1981), 553-54, 555, in facsimile. (J443). Franklin Variorum 1998 (F522A). -History from Franklin Variorum 1998"

So there you have it!

More on Dickinson's dashes tomorrow!

NOTE: @grayman on Counter Social responded: "Perhaps she was influenced by Clement Clarke Moore?
"Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!" LOL!

PART 2 IS HERE; PART 3 IS HERE.

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Busboys and Poets

11/7/2023

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Some background: When Melon Husk took over Twitter and reinstated Grand Imperial Wizard Trump's account -- AND -- he allowed for uncontrolled, unchecked hate-speech and misinformation, I deleted my account. I then joined Counter Social, and I've been on that social media platform for a little over a year now. Plus, in early November 2023 on Counter Social, I started a regular feature with a daily post of facts, trivia, and poetry related to Emily Dickinson. I post info every morning and tag it with the hashtag, #DickinsonDaily.

Below are three posts -- from 11/2, 11/4 and 11/5 -- AND -- there's a surprise ending to it all!

From November 2:

I’ve got a lot of reading to do!

Article-wise, I did read “Bitchy Little Spinster: Emily and the Woman in her Orbit” (the woman being Mabel Loomis Tood) by Joanne O’Leary (via London Review of Books) – and though I did post some info from this article in early October (having to do w/the love affair between Ms. Todd and Dickinson’s brother Austin) – I want to read it again to gain more info on the early publications of Dickinson’s poetry.

I also have “The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson” (i.e., her “fascicles”) by R. W. Franklin, and “Reviewers’ Despair: The Politics of Dickinson’s Critical Reception during the 1890s” by Mariette Messmer. This article is basically a review of Willis J. Buckingham’s “Emily Dickinson Reception in the 1890s,” a compilation of all 600 extant notes and review articles published when the posthumous editions of Dickinson’s poetry first appeared.
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I also recently got “Positive as Sound: Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme” by Judy Jo Small. I had hoped Santa might drop that book off for me at Christmas – but lo & behold, my wife got it for me for my birthday!

Today I thought I’d share an interesting tidbit from the “Critical Reception” article re: reviews of Dickinson’s poetry after selected poems were published in 1890.

The article (again, a review of a much larger work by W. J. Buckingham) is divided into three sections:

1: Regional Rivalries: Boston vs. New York;
2: The British Reception; and
3: The Politics of Gender and Genre – and the “interesting tid-bit comes from the first section.

In this first passage, Messmer notes that before the turn of the 20th century, the publishing-center of the US was shifting from Boston to New York City:

“It is Boston’s decline as a literary authority, combined with New York’s increasing skepticism toward literary productions originating from this (former) rival…that is largely responsible for the relatively subdued responses to Dickinson’s poems shown by many of New York’s leading literary papers and magazines…(and as a result)...initially Dickinson was indeed advertised and marketed as a Boston product"..."She was a 'Boston Fad' before the national monthlies had a chance to comment."

She then provided this quote from Buckingham’s book: “Some New York and western publications warned against Dickinson as a 'Boston fad,' the enervated exemplar of a waning New England school of letters. One California paper, early on, suggested that her popularity was the self-serving creation of a ‘New England clique.’”

Turns out that Dickinson was quite an enduring fad, huh?

From November 4:

When Dickinson’s poems were first published in 1890, the literary center of the country was shifting from Boston to New York. As a result, some of the early reviews out of New York referred to Dickinson as the “Boston fad,” the enervated exemplar of a waning New England literary scene. Even one paper out in California suggested that her popularity was “the self-serving creation of a New England clique.”

Though many of the more-powerful literary voices were critical of Dickinson, out of the 20-plus reviews that appeared in New York in 1890 and 1891, approximately one-third were in papers and magazines that had strong ties to Dickinson supporters (Higginson, Todd, etc.) – and this helped her poetry from failing completely on the New York literary scene.

However, in an 1892 review, the long-time editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, dismissed Dickinson and said this: "It is plain that Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and grotesque fancy. She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson ... But the incoherence and formlessness of her versicles are fatal" -- and he added, "an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village (or anywhere else) cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravitation and grammar.”And by the way – Aldrich was not alone in his criticisms of Dickinson – and the early reviews seemed to focus on the debate between those who believed “poetry could dispense with traditional form and finish and those who believed it could not.”

Hmm…here’s an experiment you can try today: Ask your friends if they’ve heard of Emily Dickinson; then ask if they’ve heard of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. LOL.

From November 5:

Yesterday I mentioned early (as in 1890, 1891, and 1892) reviews of Dickinson’s poetry. She was called the “Boston fad,” and the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, dismissed Dickinson for her “incoherence and formlessness,” and said she was “an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England village”

LOL – then I asked people to conduct an experiment: “Ask your friends if they’ve heard of Emily Dickinson; then ask if they’ve heard of Thomas Bailey Aldrich.”
That reminded me of a story of another well-known American poet, who – when he was working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC – he encountered poet Vachel Lindsay, with whom he shared some poems.
Have you heard of Vachel Lindsay?

He lived from 1879 until 1931, and the Wikipedia article about him states, “In the final twenty years of his life, Lindsay was one of the best-known poets in the U.S.”

Again – have you heard of Vachel Lindsay?
Well, the busboy I mentioned earlier recognized Mr. Lindsay when he visited the restaurant -- so he shared some of his own works with the poet – and Mr. Lindsay was so impressed he encouraged and mentored the young busboy poet.

As a matter of fact, there’s a chain of restaurants in the Washington DC area named “Busboys and Poets,” named after the incident at the Wardman Park Hotel when the busboy (and future poet) recognized poet Vachel Lindsay and shared some of his poems with him.

Do you know the name of the busboy poet? I guarantee you do.

The busboy who later became a well-known poet was Langston Hughes.

And now -- like Paul Harvey used to say -- you know the rest of the story!

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Dash It All -- Part 3

Dash It All -- Part 2

Dash It All -- Part 1

Busboys and Poets

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