I recently ordered Within Flesh, Poems: In Conversation with Our Selves & Emily Dickinson by Al Salehi and Ivy Schweitzer. The book arrived last month, and I wrote about it HERE. Yesterday, I touched on the Foreword to the book by poet Faleeha Hassan. Today, I have a few bits to share about the book’s introduction.
| The intro is entitled “The Lamp Burns Sure Within,” the opening line of a poem by Dickinson, and that work appears at the conclusion of the section, following the final statement of the authors, “And so, with this collection, we offer the reader our version of a more colorful and just tomorrow.” There is also a photo of Dickinson’s original manuscript of the poem.  | This poem – along with a line from the intro itself, “As we wrote poems prompted by (Dickinson’s) incomparable work, it seemed to us as if she were responding through time, in startlingly appropriate language”” – called to mind another but similarly themed poem by Dickinson, ”The Poets light but lamps,” a work I featured in a recent post, HERE.  |
The image from this poem’s first stanza – that the poets’ enduring “wicks” (i.e., lamps) “stimulate” with “vital light” – literally echoes the sentiment expressed by Salehi and Schweitzer.
Later in the introduction, Salehi and Schweitzer reference Dickinson’s practice of including alternative word and line choices on many of her manuscripts which, they say, “renders her poems radically open, improvisational, and dynamic.” As a result, in the closing paragraph they note, ‘This intentional indeterminacy encourages us to see the poems, as scholar Marta Werner describes them: ‘not as still points of meaning or as incorruptible texts but, rather, as events and phenomena of freedom.’”
This analysis called to mind two powerful perspectives of Dickinson’s poetry that I shared in some recent posts. The first is from an essay by professor and author Julia Hejduk who called Dickinson “a poet of incarnation—of the small, concrete, and quotidian becoming a vessel for the infinite.” How deeply true.
The other is from a letter to Mabel Loomis Todd from W. I. Fletcher who had heard a presentation by Todd on Emily Dickinson in June 1892. In his letter, Fletcher stated that “Dickinson wrote poetry which embalmed and interpreted the most insignificant things in nature,” and he compared her works to another well-known poet of the day, J. Whitcomb Riley, by noting that Riley’s work was “also poetry…but it merely helps us see the things without doing much to help us see into them” – that is, as Dickinson’s works do – we see into things.
Later in the introduction, Salehi and Schweitzer reference Dickinson’s practice of including alternative word and line choices on many of her manuscripts which, they say, “renders her poems radically open, improvisational, and dynamic.” As a result, in the closing paragraph they note, ‘This intentional indeterminacy encourages us to see the poems, as scholar Marta Werner describes them: ‘not as still points of meaning or as incorruptible texts but, rather, as events and phenomena of freedom.’”
This analysis called to mind two powerful perspectives of Dickinson’s poetry that I shared in some recent posts. The first is from an essay by professor and author Julia Hejduk who called Dickinson “a poet of incarnation—of the small, concrete, and quotidian becoming a vessel for the infinite.” How deeply true.
The other is from a letter to Mabel Loomis Todd from W. I. Fletcher who had heard a presentation by Todd on Emily Dickinson in June 1892. In his letter, Fletcher stated that “Dickinson wrote poetry which embalmed and interpreted the most insignificant things in nature,” and he compared her works to another well-known poet of the day, J. Whitcomb Riley, by noting that Riley’s work was “also poetry…but it merely helps us see the things without doing much to help us see into them” – that is, as Dickinson’s works do – we see into things.
| So these poets, Salehi and Schweitzer – and poet Faleeha Hassan, whom I wrote about yesterday – and Julia Hejduk and W. I. Fletcher, both mentioned above – and Magdalena Ball, the blogger featured in the post I linked at the start of this article – and I – and so many others – we have all sat by the undying wick of Dickinson’s lamp, read her words through individual lenses, and marveled at the all-encompassing circle of existence, at the meanings that lie within and beyond the limits of her words, at the connections of single beings to an experience, at communication beyond eloquence. In short, the circumference of her poetry, the critical and culminating word in “The Poets light but lamps” - and the very word Dickinson distinctly emphasized in an 1862 letter to Higginson: “My business is Circumference.” |  |
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