Emily Dickinson
 

Emily Dickinson,
born in Amherst,
christened in Amherst,
never married in Amherst,
blossomed in Amherst,
faded in Amherst,
died in Amherst,
buried in Amherst,
and that was the end of
Emily Dickinson.

Was it the end of Emily Dickinson though? I'd say she's had quite an afterlife in her poetry and readers, at minimum. This piece also glosses over the intense inner life she lived, as if what really mattered was her geographical location.

Well exactly, Hilary. I think I hoped a reader would see that the last line is self-evidently wrong, and read the poem again, backwards, from there. It is, in fact (in my mind, although perhaps not on paper yet), a poem against metropolitanism (or against the need for metropolitanism in every case ).

But it doesn't seem to be working in that sense, so I'll have to have a think about that.

Cheers

David

Hi David, it's quite possible that I am just spectacularly dense, but I didn't find evidence of irony other than - as you put it - the self-evident wrongness. Perhaps that's too much of a leap to ask most readers to make? I don't know. It might just be me.

Hi David,

I missed your intent completely and tentatively took the poem to be almost a dismissal of Emily's posthumous acclaim. My first thought was to respond that I would recuse myself from commenting because being one who had mentioned a couple times on the sphere the names of Shakespeare and Dickinson in the same breath, I held a bias. Your poem at first made me wonder whether UK poets tend to think she gets her reputation primarily because Americans need a little bit of cultural provenance on this side of the Atlantic. I am glad to see how wrong I would have been. It appears you actually want to point out that a poet away from the big cities and dependent on their own resources and imagination can do amazing things with words. To me, it is a small miracle that her work survived, and apparently did so despite her own self-imposed scrutiny.... This has been a lot of wind to say that yes, your poem may not be accomplishing what it set out to do.

All the best,
Jim

Well, I laughed at the ending. Perhaps a title like "Failure" would help to semaphore how ridiculous the narrator's yardstick is.

Maybe sprinkle some dashes/hyphens here and there to telegraph the tongue-in-cheekiness of the ending? (Perhaps "—in Amherst—" throughout?)

Hi David,

It came across to me that Amherst had a negative influence on her, according to the poem. Either that or you were simply alluding to her reclusive nature, being confined to Amherst (with the implication again being negative, or at least sad).

I definitely agree that it glosses over things. It needs to be developed a lot. I think you could do a bit of research about her own attitude to Amherst and how (if at all) she was involved in the community. I think I read that she did have some involvement, rather than being as reclusive as supposed, although I might be wrong there. I also think some sense of how the people of Amherst viewed her would be great.

I'd love to get a sense of what Amherst was like at this time, but I don't get that from the poem as it is. Even the first result on Google when I search 1850s Amherst sounds promising, so there may well be loads more detail that could make for a fine poem: "In the 1850s, Amherst, Massachusetts was a growing town with a bustling center, particularly on Main Street, a dirt road with horse-drawn carts transporting goods. The town was a mix of farms, factories, and a thriving community with shops and the popular Amherst House inn. Amherst Academy, where Emily Dickinson was a student, emphasized both morality and a broad curriculum, including science, with lectures from Amherst College."

I hope this feedback helps.

All the best,

Trev

How about Read It Slant? Haha. I laughed at the ending as well.

Hi David,

Well yeah, my fellow commenters, I get it too, now that I've been led there by the nose after the fact. One word would have kept me from going astray on first reading, but it's probably too cliche at this point after years of use, and that would be the old Saturday Night Live trick of saying something with false sincerity and then adding the emphatic "Not!" afterward to point out the irony intended, so that the poem would read like this:

...buried in Amherst,
and that was the end of
Emily Dickinson—not!

All the best,
Jim