POETS Day: Let’s Talk About Emily Dickinson

The Dickinson painting. Harvard Art Museums, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Here we go. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday and this one is a cauldron in an ill-equipped kitchen of let downing-ism. It’s em dash misery all around and you can lay that right at the feet of the poet were it not for the sad and unimaginative responses I got from surrounding restaurant employees when polled about their best excuse to get out of a shift.

The purpose of POETS Day is to jump start your weekend and end your Friday work responsibilities as soon as possible. When asked how to end the workday early, I expect creativity. My inquiries produced none. I asked bartenders and waiters all over.

A flat tire does not get you out of work. It makes you late. Paying a co-worker to take your shift is a responsible action, not a disguised AWOL. I’m looking for subterfuge – diabolical stuff. But this is what they gave me. You have a cough? …Please.

The pro-form POETS Day escape plan includes immediacy, a sympathetic goal, the collective scorn of the boss or supervisor by the rest of the staff if said boss/supervisor is not attentive and acceptive to your needs to get on with things that may be more important than work, and most importantly a Monday explanation that plausibly casts all fears aside because it was nothing and aren’t we just lucky about that.

I got people talking about a flat tire when I was fishing for “I think my cat had a stroke.” I spoke to amateurs.

This week’s poet seems to be a lunatic, but one that had a sexual scandal, so all is encouraged.

There was a writer named Mike Resnick, and I had the joy to meet him. In his later days, my wife edited a few of his novels and he was wonderful. He printed one of her stories in his magazine and offered her his experience in the field. Resnick was a contemporary of Asimov and Heinlein and he was absurdly prolific. We used to joke that he pooped Hugo Awards.

One night in Atlanta, we were having a beer. It wasn’t he and me or anything like that. This was at DragonCon, and he was holding court. He was giving advice to hopeful writers, and I was a spouse who was useful for runs to the bar.

One young woman said that she wrote for herself and didn’t want to show her stuff to anyone. Mike said this kindly, but it was felt. “Why?”

His thought was why would you write if you don’t show it to anyone.

He said that those thoughts are all yours when they wisp around in your head, but the urge to put them on paper is the urge to make them known. He went on to say that you need to make an editor do their job. If you aren’t an editor, he argued, don’t act as one and deny the work you did the possibility of publication. Make them tell you no. It’s their job.

I’m wondering if Emily Dickinson would have benefitted from a beer night with Mike.

She published ten poems in her life. After death she became a legend when her sister Livinia published eighteen hundred poems that Emily had, I don’t know, squirreled under her bed. I don’t know if it was that she didn’t want attention in the sense that many of the fame averse do.

She didn’t leave her house often. There’s a story about a funeral of a family member that was held at her home. She stayed in her bedroom and cracked the door. She was by all recounts an agoraphobic. Eventually she only wore white clothing. There was all manner of oddity. Maybe she didn’t want any attention at all.

Did I mention the sister-in-law?

That would be Susan. Looks like they were, um, close. It was considered improper because it was before the period when guys thought it was okay to ask to watch and so nowhere near the period when guys knew that you probably shouldn’t ask to watch. There was a middle time with cameras and stuff, but poetry fans missed it completely. We were making saving throws or something.

So here is an Emily Dickinson poem. I don’t like her stuff. I don’t like the em dash even though I use it myself. I don’t like the false rhyme. I just don’t like it.

What I do like is the idea of an insane woman sleeping with her sister in-law Miss Habersham-type peeking out from a pantry wearing all white and thinking that but for an em dash go I. That’s good stuff.

I’m Nobody! Who Are You?

Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Not my bag, but she made a splash. Hers is a diary of a teen-ager and first drafts at that. I bet if she wanted to publish it would be polished and amazing. But…