[Mark McDonnell]

Aaron and Andrew, haha.

Here's aging free love anarcho-freaks The Fugs getting in on the act. Emily makes her appearance about a minute and a half in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5LHA8YQmJU

[Daniel Recktenwald]

Very interesting thread.

I'm guilty not of "Dickinson porn," but I did write a sonnet re-doubled about Dickinson. An overweening piece of idolatry written under the influence of one particular biography (the speculations in which I found very edifying at the time). In one section / sonnet, when I approached Dickinson's room, it was with my variorum edition, notebook, and a pen. I wanted to talk poetry. She slammed the door in my face. (that sonnet was framed as a dream)

She truly is becoming the American Shakespeare, in this sense: that so many different camps and constituencies can pour what they seem to need to into a Belle-shaped mold. It strikes me a lot like the "bardolatry" phenomenon around Shakespeare.

As in many areas, in this one, "the worst are full of passionate intensity."

And as with Will, when I sense I'm getting too senseless about Dickinson, I just re-read a poem of hers. Or two. Or a dozen.

When I shut the hell up and let her speak for her and about her, my most passionate feeling about Dickinson is gratitude. Or awe.

Daniel

[Michael Juster]

In The Billy Collins Experience I have a response to Collins' poem about undressing Dickinson.

It's called "Emily Dickinson's Restraining Order."

[Susan McLean]

I, too, dislike them. The celebrity-crush poem is endemic, and the subset of fixations on literary figures of the past abounds, but I have to say that the poems about sex with Emily Dickinson are particularly repellent because they feel like rape fantasies even though they present the sex as consensual. Women like Dickinson and Austen were able to preserve their privacy and autonomy by having a loving and supportive family that did not insist that they marry and that allowed them some space and free time for doing something they clearly loved. These rape fantasies present the authors as rescuing Dickinson from a life of loneliness and repression, but they seem to ignore her own choices and fierce determination to be herself. I don't see a poem like Wendy Cope's admission of having a crush on A. E. Housman as being equivalent, because the whole point of a poem like that is a wry admission that such a love is impossible.

Susan

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks for the thoughts on how this situation is different.

Okay, even with my most charitable squinting I can't see much redeeming artistic value in the following menstrual-oral-sex poem, although the author seems to consider it humorously tongue in...well, not exactly cheek:

Keven C. Cole [no, whoops, he seems to be the journal's editor--poet is Damon Norco], "Love Lines"

I suppose this sort of response could be related to so-called cute aggression, which seems to be a similar struggle to regulate overwhelming positive feelings by expressing strong negative feelings; or it could even be analogous to certain types of art vandalism. Dickinson's work can certainly be emotionally overwhelming.

In general, diminishing a female poet's power over him by reducing her, in his own work, to a bangable bimbo might make a heterosexual male poet feel he's in control of the situation.

[Edited to add a #NotAllMen, lest someone feel offended even though it should be obvious that I'm not talking about all heterosexual male poets, and to correct the attribution.]

[Aaron Novick]

Well-put, Susan.

[Aaron Novick]

Julie, I think that one is by Damon Norko, not Kevin Cole. But, regardless, ugh.

I've added it to the list in the OP.

[Roger Slater]

And yet, off the top of my head it's hard to think of more than six or eight poems about having sex with Gerard Manley Hopkins.

[Aaron Novick]

No worst, there is none, than sex with you, Gerard.
Your misery gets me neither horny, nor hard.

[Daniel Recktenwald]

Big Thank you and Yea to all you said upthread, Susan McLean!

Roger and Aaron, you're making me laugh in spite of myself. What'd Gerry ever do to y'all . . ...?