‘. . . poetry most fully demonstrates
who we are as human beings
by calling attention to our distance from wholeness
or perfection or full insight.’
The writings of Emily Dickinson, a crucial 19th-century
poet, may seem simple on cursory reading. But her
deceptively rich works continue to bring up religious
and philosophical questions for modern writers.
Dickinson hungered to glimpse a world beyond the
world we live in, and wondered, if she did get a
view of it, whether she could find words to describe
it. “Hunger was a way/Of persons outside windows,”
she wrote. Can mere words tell of that other world
glimpsed, or do they fall short, even tarnish it?
Virginia Tech English Professor Thomas Gardner says
that, for modern poet Jorie Graham, Dickinson’s
poems “end on great failures of human speech”
— shattered before what they are unable to
fully articulate. In her poetry, Graham searches
for “contemporary ways of tracing and exploring
the implications of such failures,” Gardner
says.
Modern novelist Marilynne Robinson believed Dickinson
attained “some measure of access to the unspoken
through such failures,” Gardner says.
Robinson lamented in an interview in 1992 that
ideas brought up by earlier American writers such
as Dickinson, Melville, and Thoreau were “dropped
without being resolved.” However, poets and
novelists are once again addressing themes from
Dickinson’s poetry, and Gardner has received
a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book on Dickinson’s
influence on today’s poets and novelists. The
book explores the influence of Emily Dickinson’s
“fallen poetics” on contemporary works
of such poets as Graham, Charles Wright, and Susan
Howe and novelist Robinson, and points out “the
way these writers extend certain words, phrases,
and situations first put into play by Dickinson.”
The term “fallen poetics” comes from
Elisa New at Harvard, and is “the idea that
poetry most fully demonstrates who we are as human
beings by calling attention to our distance from
wholeness or perfection or full insight,” Gardner
says. In other words, “we are fallen from paradise.”
Dickinson used fleeting phrases, dashes, and ellipses
to attempt to paint the image of that brief moment
of being able to see that other world while being
unable to express it adequately: “the Horses’
Heads/Were toward Eternity—” “And
then the Windows failed—and then/I could not
see to see—” “Parting is all we know
of heaven,” and, on glimpsing eternity, “Just
lost, when I was saved!/Just felt the world go by!”
As our language changes to acknowledge the fact
of our separation from that desired world, “Dickinson
shows we also become much more responsive to the
world around us,” Gardner says. “We inhabit
the world more fully when we acknowledge its difference
from the limited terms and models and expectations
we approach it with.”
In his book, Gardner will explore the ways contemporary
writers have been expanding and testing this idea.
For example, Robinson said that, in her novel Housekeeping,
she was “consciously trying to participate
in the conversation they {Dickinson and the others}
had carried on and that I felt had been dropped.”
Gardner says that in the novel, Robinson was “powerfully
responding to and extending her investigations of
the link between an acknowledgment of human limits
and the opening out of human responsiveness to a
world beyond our capacity to master or possess.”
Robinson’s novel expands on Dickinson’s
poem “I dwell in Possibility—” and
the house becomes the central metaphor for being
open to the possibility of other worlds. Two girls
lose their father very early, and their mother kills
herself by driving into a lake. The sisters are
raised by their vagabond aunt, who hardly ever cleans
her house and leaves doors open, so that the house
is attuned to the outside world. “Ruth, the
younger girl, learns to be attuned to what’s
missing,” Gardner says.
“Using
snatches of Dickinson’s poems picked up from
school and her early reading to frame her lyric
meditations, Ruth tests out Dickinson by making
her metaphors literal and then attentively moving
around within them,” Gardner says. “Thus,
Dickinson’s account of the ‘sumptuous
Destitution’ experienced by someone cut off
from a source of joy and ‘ha{ving} no home,’
becomes a homeless, lyric-voiced drifter and a vagabond
aunt, while Dickinson’s house of ‘possibility’
becomes a dwelling charged with its own inadequacies.”
In her poem, Dickinson speaks of “gathering
paradise by spreading wide her narrow hands and
letting it go,” Gardner says, and “Housekeeping
meditates on how letting something go gives us a
feel for how big it is.”
In addition, Gardner realized after reading Charles
Wright’s book Zone Journals, which includes
the long poem “A Journal of the Year of the
Ox,” that the book’s central image is
a beam of light in the afternoon, an image from
a Dickinson poem. The phrase brought up a series
of religious and philosophical questions that Wright
dealt with in his poem, Gardner says.
“I realized that the central image, a disappearing
beam of light on a winter afternoon, was drawn from
Dickinson’s ‘There’s a certain Slant
of light,’” Gardner says. Wright had been
raised in a religious atmosphere, but was no longer
religious, “but his poems continue asking about
intimations that there might be another world,”
Gardner says. Dickinson’s poem ends by saying
that, when the light — or the glimpse of another
world — ends, “’tis like the distance/On
the look of death.”
“Wright and Dickinson feel the ‘heavenly
hurt’ of catching and then losing a glimpse
of some presence beyond them,” Gardner says.
“Wright’s poem is in conversation with
Dickinson’s about this.”
Gardner’s book, to be titled Emily Dickinson
and Contemporary Writers, is, in its own way,
a conversation. Not only will it examine the
way modern writers’ works converse with
those of Dickinson, but the book also will
include Gardner’s interviews of the four
writers talking about Dickinson and her influence
on their writings. It also will include in-depth
essays on works by Robinson, Graham, Wright,
and Howe and an introduction that touches
on the works of about 10 other writers. “Poets
are amazingly good critics,” Gardner
says. “The book will have me talking
about the poets and then the poets and me
talking about Dickinson.”
The idea of including interviews with the
writers is one that Gardner has used successfully
before, particularly in his book Regions of
Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 1999). “It’s
something I love to do,” he says.
“I admire this work very much,”
says Willard Spiegelman, author of Majestic
Indolence; English Romantic Poetry and the
Work of Art, of Gardner’s Regions of
Unlikeness. “The inclusion of interviews
with three of the selected poets strikes me
as a brilliant stroke of judgment. The poets
become their own best spokespersons, and the
book becomes a kind of critical collaboration,
or a ‘conversation’ in which critic
and poet give the reader access to the very
processes by which intuition becomes knowledge.”
The interviews, wrote the publisher of Regions
of Unlikeness, “are themselves examples
of the charged intimacy Gardner deals with
in his readings.”
Gardner’s Guggenheim award comes from
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,
which offers fellowships “to further
the development of scholars and artists by
assisting them to engage in research in any
field of knowledge and creation in any of
the arts.” The fellowships go to people
who have “already demonstrated exceptional
capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional
creative ability in the arts” and who
show promise of further outstanding work.
Gardner, who has held a Fulbright Bicentennial
Chair in American Studies at the University
of Helsinki and has received several Virginia
Tech awards for teaching and scholarship,
is a poet in his own right, and has published
several books about poetry. They include Discovering
Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary American
Long Poem (University Illinois Press, 1989)
and Regions of Unlikeness.
In
addition, he has received the Phi Beta Kappa
Sturm Award for Outstanding Faculty Research.
His research methods include more than visits
to libraries and scholarly repositories. He
uses the interlibrary loan system and has
studied Dickinson’s manuscripts at Harvard
and visited her house in Amherst. But the
majority of his research is simply listening
to writers and responding to what he hears.
“In the largest sense,” he says,
“I see my job as trying to keep up with
contemporary writing, mostly contemporary
poetry, but as much other writing as I can
follow as well. So I read, trying to puzzle
things out and follow careers of writers,
noticing when a new book by a writer goes
off in a significant new direction.”
Gardner tests his observations by giving
papers on various writers or writing essays,
published in professional journals, about
their work — ”mostly trying to describe
what I see going on and teasing out the echoes
of other writers or fleshing out intellectual
currents they’re moving in.”
He does a fair amount of corresponding with
writers, which he says is a good way to test
ideas and sense new directions. “The
interviews I conduct are more elaborate versions
of the same,” he says. “The three
special issues of Contemporary Literature
that I’ve edited on American poetry of
the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s have
been useful ways for me to test ideas as well.
I’ve gathered essays from various scholars
that address what I take to be some of the
major issues of the period. That’s allowed
me to hear ideas I sense going on in contemporary
writing resonating in larger contexts.”
Gardner’s own poetry is another part
of his research. His 12-poem sequence called
“Running Journal: Finland” was published
in Roots and Renewal: Writings by Bicentennial
Professors, and his poems have been published
in numerous poetry journals. “Trying
to write my own poems — though not so
many nowadays — has given me at least
the impression that I can sometimes read the
poems of others from the inside, sensing the
issues and problems that generate often confusing
strings of images.”
Gardner’s
method of doing interviews is also a part
of his research method. “Usually I first
prepare an essay or chapter on a writer, which
means reading everything they’ve written
and trying to chart a revelatory path through
it. Usually I send that essay to the writer
ahead of time, though not always. Sometimes
they read it, though not always!”
The actual interviews take a day or two,
Gardner said. “I go in with certain ideas
that I want to test, but that’s mostly
so that I have a position to offer the writer
to let him or her play off of. The interviews,
of course, take their own directions, and
my job is just to listen hard and make connections.
“After the interview is completed, I
edit it pretty fiercely, rearranging material,
dropping things, trying to find a clear, emotional/intellectual
line through it. Then I send the piece back
to the writer, asking some new questions or
pushing for expansion. The writer adds material,
drops things, brings up new things. This can
take anywhere from two months to a year, depending
on what comes up. It’s a pretty collaborative
process.
“To be honest,” Gardner says, “a
lot of what I do is simply read one poet’s
work while listening to all the other voices
surrounding it.”
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