 First Wednesdays is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and by the Kellogg-Hubert Library with video production supported by Orca Media. Good evening everyone. I'm Tom, I'm the executive director of the Kellogg-Hubert Library. It's great to have you with us on this first Wednesday. This is one of the many Palm City events we have scheduled throughout the month. For those of you who are here a few minutes ago, you already heard it. It's unsolicited promotion to Palm City. This is the 10th year the Kellogg-Hubert Library has presented this series. If you don't have a program already, there are plenty of them on the way in and out. This is also part of the Vermont Humanities Council's first Wednesdays humanities lecture series. The Humanities Council offers these presentations throughout the state of Vermont in the Kellogg-Hubert Library. I'm very pleased to be the local host for this. Tonight, for our first get-up, we state-wide underwriters for the Humanities Council series. The Alma-Gibbs-Donchin Foundation, Vermont Department of Libraries and Wind Foundation, and the underwriter for tonight's presentation is the University of Vermont Humanities Center. Our presenter for the title here is Emily Dickinson, poet of New England. So for the local poets in the audience that Appalachian has already taken, you have to come up with something else. You can't be a poet of New England. We have Huck Guttman here to do the presentation. Huck is a professor of English emeritus at the University of Vermont where he taught courses in 19th century and 20th century American poetry and modern poetry and translation. A former chair of the UDM English department, he has twice taught abroad as a full-brightened fellow. He has written or edited four books and has been a regular political columnist for major newspapers abroad. He also spent six years in Washington serving as chief of staff for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. We've heard him. Good thing. Would you please join me in welcoming Huck Guttman. Glad to have so many of you here. Let me start out by saying I've talked a number of times in libraries. I think one of the great institutions in America and especially in Vermont are our libraries. And I'm not saying that just because I'm speaking in a library and being sponsored by a library. Libraries are maybe the only wonderful socialist institution in America. Don't blanch in socialist. You go to a library and you get what you want. All you have to do is get back. You don't have to pay for it. You pay for it with taxes and stuff. Libraries are welcoming to people. I don't know how many of you come to the library often. I go to the library in Burlington Fletcher Free Library two or three times a week. Every single computer terminal is taken. That is, we live in a society where people more and more need to be online. And lots of people don't have access to being online. And they can find it in the library. They can find books in libraries. They can find magazines in libraries. They can go to cultural events in libraries. And it's open to everyone. I think we sometimes don't realize how extraordinary it is that we have a system of public libraries all throughout the country, and especially in Vermont. So I wanted to start by saying that. The second thing I want to say is, I had originally thought I'd talk about Emily Dickinson as a New England poet. She says in one of her poems, it begins, I cry too in cartoon. She says, I sing like the Queen. I sing provincially. She's proud of her New England roots. But instead of talking about her as a New England poet, I thought I'd just talk about her as an extraordinary poet. I think of her as one of the two or three greatest of American poets. William in Love with Walt Whitman. And with William Carlos Williams. She's a great great poet. I thought we would perhaps just go through her poetry and get a sense of how she does things and why she's such a great poet. Now, here's, she engaged in a lot of correspondence with the man named Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He asked for a photo of her. I'm going to show you a photo, actually. I'm going to show you two. And she said, I love this. She wrote great letters. Nobody in the whole history of English language wrote letters as good as her. Except maybe John Keats. You all know about John Keats. And he says, not as good as Keats. Keats said, I believe in nothing but the holiness of the hearts. I believe in nothing but the holiness of the hearts. And the truth of the imagination. Just end that off no matter. And she has these great letters. And in one of them, when Higginson worked for a magazine after a photograph, she said, could you believe me without I had no portrait now but I'm small like the ring and my hair is bold like the chestnut berth that is reddish-brownish. You all know about chestnuts. And my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves with that. With this dude just as well. Well, we do have a picture of her. That's the famous picture of her, which is on the cover of your thing. And some pretty remarkable scholarship on earth and another picture of her only about 10 years ago. So for 150 years this is the only picture we had. But here's the other picture. She's this figure right here. Older. See, she wasn't the greatest looking person, I suppose. And she was, stories have it. She was kind of a reckless, right? She didn't leave her house and garden for years. In fact, she often wouldn't leave her room when a good friend of hers went overseas and came back. He had to speak to her through a closed door. She was in the room and he was outside. I guess if we wanted to diagnose her, we would call her agoraphobic, afraid of going out in public. And that seems to be small stuff. I mean, really, I mention that because most of you may have heard that. And most of you hear that she's a reckless, right? We can't hide it. But that's not what she's about. So here's a poem of hers. Who was the person on the left? Oh, that's a woman that takes God to turn her. And I know nothing about her. That's a good question. There's a very short, light poem of hers. And I don't think anybody writes about it or talks about it, except for me. I really love the poem. It's called We Introduce Ourselves. And I don't believe in mystifying you. You should all have a copy of her poems in front of you. So if you think I'm pulling a fast one on you, I need you to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, what about this? The truth is, when we talk about poems, they often skip over lines because they don't understand them very well, or it doesn't fit in their interpretation. And you're allowed to do that. You can always catch up with people. They say, oh, oh, oh, it goes without saying. Like, there'll be stands about the grass being too tall that I don't even want to respond to. I don't really understand that. Puzzle improved. And puzzled over it. If we could understand the poems completely, we wouldn't really need them. We could walk away with them. But we go back to them because they keep speaking to us and keep saying more and are deeper. And this is a wonderful example of that. This is a very, very short poem. It's, as you see, five lines. And it is really easy, it seems. We introduce ourselves to planets and to flowers, but with ourselves have etiquettes, embarrassments, and flaws. I'd like to look at that for just a moment and then we'll go on to some other poems. But we know what she means by etiquette. So when we meet people, we say, how are you? Which I can. We make sure we're dressed. If we're men, not so much today, not me. We share certain procedures whereby we relate to one another. First, we have etiquettes and we have embarrassments. We all know that in moments when we encounter another people. I mean, I want to talk about certain things or we're a little embarrassed. And sometimes, do you know what they say? There's another person in front of me and we're all by it. I think it's a very wonderful poem. But it took me a number of years to realize that I was reading it too quickly and I think we don't want to read poems too quickly. There's this funny word ourselves. And I think she's not just talking as we first may think, or as I first thought when I read it, about our relation to other people. It's also, the poem works on two levels, right? And this is how we relate to other people with etiquettes, embarrassments, and flaws. That's also the way we need myself, right? Our own selves. And even with ourselves, we have rules by which we function. And we have embarrassments. Any time we stand before ourselves in what we feel and are just astonished and astounded. So this is an indication, it seems to me, of a very short poem which says a lot to us or can say a lot to us about not only how we relate and have trouble relating to other people, but how we sometimes have trouble relating to ourselves. Because it's easy to talk to the universe, to planets, and to flowers. Although we'll get a poem where it's not so easy to talk to flowers in the air. But it's really hard to deal with other people and with our own selves. So that would be my start with Dickinson, and we will find again and again not that she's trying, you know, she's not writing for high school classes. She's not writing for people at libraries. She wrote 1,770 poems. She wrote them up by hand. She sewed them together in little booklets and stuck them in a drawer and published 12 in her lifetime. She's not trying to blow us away. She was writing, well, we'll come to this at the end. She was writing poems because that's what she did. And the kind of depth of the ourselves here that it makes the poem work on two different levels. They can be about our relations to other people or our relations with our own self is something we'll encounter again and again. Now, here's a picture of the house that she lived in in Hammers, Massachusetts. Here's a contemporaneous etching or engraving. She wrote the poems we'll be reading about 1860. Here's a more modern picture of it. And here's a picture of her room or bedroom as it's been reconstructed. And here's her room with her bed. And the first poem we're going to read is about waking up in bed. And like this, which ashamed, there are going to be curtains, and the curtains open a little bit, and she looks out the curtain. I mean, you couldn't have a poem on a smaller subject. Then I woke up in the morning and I opened my eyes and I could see out a little bit of the curtain. That's the whole poem, right? And that's what we're going to encounter in this next poem called The Angle of a Landscape. She's lying in bed and waking up and looking out. And the word cossering, she says, like a beniche, which we're going to get here. It's a trope for an assassin. Venice was noted for reading assassins for a reason I don't understand. So she says, the angle of a landscape that every time I wake, right, she's waking up in bed between my curtain and the wall upon an ample crack. You all understand that, right? She's looking out her window and she's got a little crack between the wall and the curtain, and what is she seeing? And then she's going to tell us. And it cossers when she awakes from the world of sleep into the world of being awake. Well, look, what's there? It's jumping on me. It costs my open eyes just a bow of apples. So there's an apple tree out her window. Hell's slacking in the sky. The pattern of a chimney. You all know that, right? If you have a chimney across the street from your house or in your bedroom, you look at the pattern of bricks on it. Every morning she sees that. Just the pattern of a chimney, the forehead of a hill, we call it sometimes, the brow of a hill. Sometimes a vein's four finger. You all know what she's talking about there? So church steeple, and sometimes there's a a weather vein that comes into view. Sometimes there's a vein's four finger, but that's occasional. Depends on which way the wind is blowing. Nobody has any trouble with the problem that far, right? Then she says it doesn't get much harder. The seasons shift my picture upon my emerald bow. I wait to find no emeralds. So what's happened? The leaves are falling. The green leaves are falling off the trees. It's fall. And then it becomes winter and there's snow on the branches, right? Then diamonds, which the snow from polar caskets fetched me. That's it. That's the poem. I look at my window and this is what I see. Sometimes the seasons change and sometimes things stay the same. The chimney and the hill and just the steeple's finger, that's the steeple itself, and on top of it, these never stir at all. And what we have here seems like nothing, but it's a meditation on what we encounter, both transitoriness and time and change, and things that endure and are there for us all the time. That's what she says when she wakes up. Waking up and looking out the window, angle of the window, for her to write about the large things that we encounter in the world, which are the world of mutation. We could talk like English majors about the world of mutation and temporal change and the world of spaces and eternal being, but she just talks about her bedroom. So let's look at another one. This is a good poem for us right now. I think it's mostly a November poem, but it can also be a Vermont April poem like today. The sky is low, the clouds are mean, a traveling like a snow across a barn or through a lot. Debates if it will go. A narrow wind complains all day, how someone treated him nature, like us, is sometimes caught without her die again. This is really, this is, I cited before somebody wanted a sound test, I cited Wordsworth who said, you know, my heart leaps up when I be all the rainbow in the sky. People in nature could save us. And here's Emily Dickinson telling us what we all know, which is the world isn't like calendars all the time. Sometimes it's just kind of grey and grubby with a little bit of snow, it doesn't have a diet, it doesn't have a crown. It's just an ordinary late spring day when we think it should be spring but it's not. Or early winter day in November. So it's again a poem of just observing what is around her with great clarity. Here's another poem of great clarity. It's called, there's been a death in the opposite house. I'm starting the poems I think are not real hard. I mean, I'm not sure any of them are easy and I'm not sure the ones that I think are hard or all that hard, but let's look at this one. There's been a death in the opposite house. So across the street somebody's died, right? And what we're going to encounter is somebody who is looking with great acuteness and great perception at what's going on, saying, hey, what does it look like if somebody dies in a house across the street? And it's going to end up, it's just like the news in just a country tale, that's its way things look, right? There's been a death in the opposite house that's lately as today happened last night. I know it by the number of such houses have all day. And I should mention here that her great contemporary, writing literally at the same time, Walt Whitman reinvented poetry. He wrote something called The Three Verses. He wrote lines that go on and on and on and so that's two lines and sometimes three lines before the line is finished. He's going to blow through everything in that language. Emily Dickinson was going to use language in the form she encountered it in poetry, which was in church, in hymns. So there's a very simple, metrical form known as hymnometer or hymnometer or balladmeter and it has alternating iambic pentamin, iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, which means four feet of four beads with eight syllables and then three beads with six syllables and she's going to use head in most of her poems. One of the astonishing things that Emily Dickinson, and she uses one of the simplest and most familiar forms of writing poetry and yet she blows right through it in her poems in poem after poem. So everything we're going to read now on her, almost everything is going to be in these quadrants, these four lines stands as alternating tetrameter and trimeter. I know it by the num looks such houses have all way, right? Somebody's just dying in the house looks kind of numb it's no out of activity somebody died there last night. The neighbors rustle in and out the doctor drives away we know where the doctor drove away, right? Of course it's a window opens like a pod mechanically I don't know why it's like a pod you can ask me about that, I don't know but the window opens mechanically somebody's airing out the room and yet it's not like ordinary I think I'll open the window it's abruptly and it's mechanically we're going to get another problem about dying which we'll talk about the few mechanical round or air or ought things are kind of mechanical kind of automatic when someone dies rather than organic and freeform somebody flings a mattress out why is that? they died on it the children hurried by they wondered if the person anymore it's a thing if it died on that I used to when a boy he didn't say she was never a boy but you know you can write what you want to write and so she'll just adopt the voice of when I was a boy does everybody follow this one so far? the minister goes stifling all the house were his and he owned all the mourners now and little boys besides I love the stands it's very funny you shouldn't have to explain jokes but you know ministers are kind of Augustus pardon me if anybody is a minister but you know they're very serious people but it's like ah somebody died here I'm taking command right as if the house were his I'm in charge here and he owned all the mourners now I'm going to tell him what to do and how to deal with this and you kids don't think about the mattress shhhh she's talk about the minister but she's also making fun of the minister and that's a little bit of a joke even it's hard to explain boomer so I'm not good at it and then the miller let's assume it's a man the suit that the man will be buried in or if it's a woman the brush she'll be buried in the appalling trade what a pun appall his funeral the man of the appall the undertaker has come and the man of the appalling trade to take the measure of the house this poem is so funny he's going to measure how the coffin should be but he's also saying I wonder how much I can charge these people for this funeral to take the measure of the house because they'll be that dark parade that's sort of beautiful it's like a parade of castles black castles on the burst and of coaches soon it's easy as a sign the intuition of the news just a country town it's an extraordinarily close look what a funeral looks like in 19th century or what it looks like when death comes we know it doesn't look like that now now people die in hospitals right some of it's the same but so much of it is different this is just what happens it's part of the routine of the town it just happens and she's going to show it to us now we're going to turn to harder poems now harder in the sense that they too will look at very specific things but we'll have to think more and this is one of my very favorite poems at first I'll give it back I promise so she's got a hat on right and a shawl I'll give it back I promise so she's got a hat on right I'll erase my shawl so she's interesting that life's little duties do precisely carefully as the very least we're infinite to me and if we're reading carefully think about poems it's not like you have to read them like you're in fifth grade and raise your hand and say teacher I know what's going on I mean it is sometimes we want to look very closely and carefully at the world and in language where it slips right by us and this poem we want to do exactly what she said what we want to be a little infinitely careful but why is she being so infinitely careful about tying her hat and creasing her shawl I tie my hat I crease my shawl life's little duties do precisely as the very least we're infinite to me why is she taking such care with such little things and she goes on to say I put new blossoms in the glass we know what's going on there nobody has any problem with that we're now going to cut some flowers in the garden and put new blossoms in the vase and throw the old away I push a pedal from my gown the anchor there what's happening there she's throwing out the old flowers some of you are throwing out old flowers right a pedal falls off one gets on her dress she pushes it off she's just paying attention she's taking infinite care with all of this and push a pedal from my gown that anchored there I weigh, I don't need it anymore I weigh the time till six o'clock I weigh the time till six o'clock I have so much to do we know what that means too it's she's not being trite but we have a setting about that that's in common pilots right time is heavy on our hands she's weighing time because she has so much to do I have to time the hat I have to crease my shoulder I have to put the flowers in the glass I have to set the table the poem really surprises us because she says and yet existence is somewhere back stopped struck my struck my ticking through my life stopped I mean precise about everything because my life stopped what does that mean she stopped I mean she's going to tell us it's a really very very difficult and painful poem I love it even though it's painful she's taking such care because her life somehow stopped and she says you know my life ended at some point in the past we kind of put ourselves away as a completed man or woman oh oh even poets can say man or woman they don't always have to assume that only one pronoun will work as a completed man or woman when the errands done we came to flesh upon so something happened born for and it she was born for something if something happened and she ain't going to get it is it love is it fulfillment as a poet is it I don't know the poem doesn't tell us it just says something stopped and my heart in a sense stopped ticking right stopped my ticking stuck my ticking through are you following this right life has stopped and she has to keep going of course she takes great care because we there may be she says ah she's such a good poet there may be miles upon miles upon the knot right I said before the time was heavy on our hands that's a little trite but this is really there may be miles of nothing this afternoon but not nothing this is not like knot like zeros right there may be miles on miles of knot I mean empty and this is all the stretches before me I was quoting before we started this and they would ask me about time I was quoting Marvelli says any hunger all before us lie deserts of vast eternity right it's empty out there and then she says if that's not enough miles on miles of knot of action sicker far she says it's bad enough that it's all empty in front of me but I have to keep going and keep cutting flowers and putting them in the bays and tying the hat creasing my shoulder and looking like miles I'm okay so of action sicker far to simulate his stinging work inquiring he said well why does she have to simulate which means pretend right cover up or act like instead of acting what you really are so why does she have to do this and she tells us so Ponda doesn't hold a lot back even though it's hard to simulate his stinging work to cover what we are I know it simulates me and she says it's covering up what we really are we pretend to be something else to cover what we are from science and from surgery right and these are are the symbol science is about knowing things and surgery is about you make curing people and making them better to cover what we are from science and from surgery and she says to telescopic eyes to bear on us unshaded they take that telescope and you try to look at something that is extraordinarily powerful like the sun and you will be blinded she doesn't want her friends she lived in the house she was born and she lived in with her mother and her father and her sister and her brother got married and built a house next door so it was all still there she don't want all these people to see how empty her life is all these miles and miles are not how her ticking is done she wants to protect them from going too much or wanting to help them to bear on us unshaded for their sake not for ours she is not hiding so that she can go around saying no no no she is hiding but she wants to protect them does all this make sense to you I think that is what she is telling us yes but I want to know why it says T-O-O also this one? yes their eyes are too telescopic to bear on us unshaded so if they weren't so telescopic they could see the devastation but because they are telescopic they will magnify the brightness of the explosion she could have been and talked about an explosion in a moment she could have said it was like a bomb right and if they could see it through a telescope they would be blinded and it would start them I think start there probably means startle we could tremble we ourselves who have had this inner devastation tremble like these other people would if they could only see what was happening but since we got a bomb and then I used to not like this and now I think it's just brilliant they hold it in our bosom it's in the past but it's also in the present the reverberations of that inner explosion and exploding everything that life was about the air we came to flesh upon it it keeps on going it is calm the aftermath of the bomb is in some sense emptiness and calmness even though the explosion keeps happening and then comes the end of the poem and this is why I like the poem so much she says therefore we do life's duties remember how it started I won't borrow you a scarf again I tie my hat I grease my short life's little dirty still I put new blossoms in the glass and throw the old old head I brush up my paddle from my gun that anchored there I wait until six o'clock I do all these little things even though life is over therefore we do life's labor the life's reward be done with scrupulous exactness to hold our senses on and she says the way we get through pain noticing and paying attention the way we get through a life in which there is ruin inside us is to pay attention to everything so the mom doesn't care I don't know if she's right there's this problem with poems that some people, myself included try to think poems to give us the answers to the problems of our lives I don't know if they do I don't know if she's right about this and it certainly lies behind the writing of her poems she's going to be scrupulously exact as in this one scrupulously exact in noticing what is going on within her now we're going to read two poems here I'm going fast because I want to go through a bunch of poems because she's such a good poet so good this is a springtime poem right there's some of you know T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land it begins April reading my lunch why is April the cruelest month can anybody answer that question yes I thought that was a great thing why is that thing that's a pretty good answer this is not a brother poem but that's a good answer anybody else the answer is because April is her brother's birthday and he bothers her that's a good answer false optimism you wouldn't like to agree with that I'm not sure it's true because in this poem as we're going to see that's not a bad answer either in this poem you know the bees come back and the daffodils come in and the grass grows it's not false life blossoms and comes alive and you can't go with it there you go I think that's the heart of this poem I don't think you're right there is a false optimism about spring but it's related to the fact that the world is renewed and we are maybe not and that's going to be the wellspring of this poem so I dreaded that for us Rob and so but Stan is kind but I guess I've got control of things and she's mastered now and she sounds like one of the words right but I mean she's not accustomed to the ground but she's not quite kind of the wellspring I'm some accustomed to him Rob and he hurts a little well and he hurts because the raven is coming back and you'll only notice the ravens have come back they never go away in Vermont but they somehow seem to appear more and eat crab apples that are shriveled on trees inside and soon they'll have worms because the ground is unfreezy so she's a little used to the raven although he hurts her I thought if I could only live till that first shout got by it becomes a shout and is lined I don't know where she came up with this line I mean this is like out of the surrealist poem of the 1930s that all the pianos and the winds had power to mangle me we know exactly what she's talking about the first sounds of birds in spring which we're supposed to love the nature that is caught without its diet but she hates the sound and hates the sound I dare not meet the daffodils for fear their yellow gown would pierce me with a fashion so foreign to my own yellow daffodils I'm a restaurant for lunch do they have yellow daffodils so cheery yellow is so cheery that it's a fashion so foreign to her own and it would pierce her it's almost like being crucified I dare not meet the daffodils for fear their yellow gown would pierce me with a fashion so foreign to my own and here's the one I don't quite understand I rush through it I wish the grass would hurry so went was time to see he'd be too tall the tallest I think she's on with the grass but I don't know I wish the grass would hurry so went was time to see he'd be too tall to go in good stretch to look at me I can be hidden the last set of four lines on the top the second centers and the fourth centers were just a little work rhyme oh her her see gown and oan and oan it's called a slant rhyme it kind of almost rhymes that doesn't rhyme this will rhyme exactly C right so she's going to use a lot of slant lines and the lines in him meter rhyme A B A B first and third lines rhyme second and fourth lines rhyme and so she's very good at using rhymes and not being so exact that they'll be singing songs pardon me sir and during the time she was writing the ability to rhyme was considered to be almost indispensable good question yes and no I mean Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays and they did the rhyme they had metrical he wrote all the sonnets and they did the rhyme yeah I think mostly poets thought that poems should rhyme and I still think today most people when they sit down to write a poem think they ought to write something in rhyme I think the movement towards lines that didn't scan easily that didn't have metrical patterns and didn't have rhymes really didn't use it to work with me or contemporary so people are already doing different things but she's working with the older model and yet as you point it out down and own our slant runs she's using the old pattern but shifting it a little bit and there's something about her that is always exploring and moving forward so let's remember we got the green grass she can't stand it all I could not bear and her bees shouldn't come I wish they'd stay away in those different countries where they know what word had days for me the bees are back I can't stand it I can't stand it and this woman has gone crazy because the animals are coming back under there is a very powerful silence and if this is a woman who was the recluse that may have had an appeal for her and suddenly it's springing and you don't get one run you get them all across the yard and they make a huge difference I wouldn't go too much on her being the recluse because we can fall into that but what you're saying which is winter, I mean that's what Elliott says at the beginning of her voice like much like this is it, winter was nice we were kind of quiet and there was snow all over everything and nothing was growing don't you have to think about social things because the snow was to the door you couldn't get out anyway but she can't stand all of this starting again and I go with you and finding that life begins again and she doesn't want to respond to her that the world is full of busyness I'm just not so far apart and she says they're here though they're here though not a creature failed, they all came back the daffodils the robins, the bees, the grass everything came back they're here though not a creature failed no blossoms stayed away in general deference to me the queen of Calvary you know what the queen of Calvary is it's Mary mother of God it's grief and mourning I'm here and everything comes back and is renewed except for me I'm in mourning I want my silence and my peacefulness and my empty devastation each one salutes me as he goes and then she turns into a kind of a child here a guy my childish plumes lift in bereaved acknowledgement of their unthinking brunts, she's bereaved she's married, she's lost everything, she lives with emptiness and fullness is coming back to the world spring is coming back to the world and the robins don't think and the bees don't think and the daffodils don't get to be thinking what we've lost and we have to go through spring and yes it's a really hard time so another bird problem I love her bird problems also not a robin a bird came down the walk I think you gotta pay attention to this at the beginning it sounds like a children's book a bird came down the walk he did not know I saw he bit an angle worm and had an ate the fellow raw so there's a very great anthropologist named Claude Levy-Strauss he thought you could there's almost all human fuck deals and almost all human culture all along the dichotomy of law and crime either civilized or natural and this bird lives in a world in the first stanza that is not your world and my world I don't think and the spring is here and you can go out and eat raw worms but this bird eats raw worms and in the next stanza he drinks a dude from a convenient grass it's not how I did I had a glass out of a glass out of a glass lower out of the glass or a little bottle right he could sit dude and then hop sideways to the wall to let a wheel pass it it's a scale between the robin and us all of these making lines are not how the robin lives in a different world than she does I don't remember except look what happens he glanced with rapid eyes and hurried all around they looked like frightened beings I thought but why was I so frightened they do, bird's eyes are always moving around I once knew an engineer at UVM who studied ocular vision birds eyes, birds only can see a little bit of what we can see there peripheral vision so their eyes move all the time and everything but why else do they look like frightened beings they look like beings because they're round like beings, bird is scared because there's this great big thing called Emily Dickinson standing there and he said and so he stirred his velvet head like one in danger, he is in danger there's this big human being next to him not a cat but he doesn't know that like one in danger no like one in danger can be read either way we go back he stirred his velvet head like one in danger or it can be I as if I am in danger because she's going to be in danger in this home cautious and offered to him a crumb so you know she's got a little piece of roll or cake or something just stay here birdie birdie that's a little I you don't actually feed crumbs to others they don't feed crumbs they eat worms but anyway she tries to offer the worm and this is so gorgeous and yet it's terrifying on another level and he unrolled his feathers and rode him softer home and oars divide the ocean with silver for a seam or butterflies off banks of noon leave plushless as they swim gorgeous, right? he unrolls his feathers and rode him softer home and oars divide the ocean with silver for a seam now that sounds gorgeous but what's happening there not hard the bird is leaving how's the bird getting away flying so the bird is flying away and it's important to notice what she just noticed that he's flying he's rowing we have a metaphor here the movement of the wings is like oars rowing you know a boat and rode him softer home than oars divide the ocean except it's too silver for a seam when the bird rows in the air it's not like there are marks have you all rowed boats or paddle cadets you leave little marks in the water right on the nature of the gun there there's no mark this bird is I would say at one with the air just like butterflies another single here butterflies who can in the middle of the day off banks of noon now they're just banks of flowers they're also just noon time leave and there's not even a splash say even to the air and what do we have at the end of the poem we have the bird has flown off and Emily did this in a stroke there with the crumb anchored firmly to the ground there's a tremendous difference between the human world which doesn't eat worms and doesn't drink dune and doesn't step aside to let beetles pass and especially doesn't make friends with the natural world so easily and the bird which just flies off into its own place I think this is an anti-lomantic capital R poem this is a poem that's very opposite to all those people who want to say oh yeah we can get close to nature we can be friends with nature we can learn from nature she's saying no wait a minute you approach nature and it flies away yes sorry to interrupt you that brings up an important point from a Midwesterners perspective what strikes you about Emily Dickinson is her sort of Calvinist environment so isn't a lot of these poems commentary or sort of a transformational figure in Calvinism? great question I don't quite have an answer for you I think she comes from a very severe Protestant background she doesn't understand religion she tells us and her poems about religion are not satisfying to those who believe in God but that's what this is no? go ahead isn't this about religion and humans and the words she capitalizes and some she doesn't just like that I'm not trying to I would caution not to think too much about about her being a recluse I would not pay too much attention to capitalization it's a little erratic in her it was not regularized until the 18th century she's living in a rural area in the 19th century so I'm not sure I would overstate doesn't mean you shouldn't refer to it but I think I think that's a step behind and I'm going to say no is she divorced from the world that God has created that he saw and felt was good capital H.D. Collins got yeah except the poem it seems to me works before we get to the religious on her in the natural world and that's what I'm presenting it to you if you're concerned that's the thing about poems if you're concerned if you're really concerned about what religion means in the world what God means in the world then of course you will read this as a disjunction between the human and the divine and I would argue by all all I'm saying is that there is this disjunction between her and the world of the bird whether the world of the bird is nature of God's world I'm up for all of that is that alright you know it's it's a poem about a divorce between two different spheres at first it's the human sphere and it's it's pretty it seems like a cute poem at the beginning where it came down to the world and it sounds like a like a nursery rhyme and it's the opposite of one nursery rhyme sorry it's also Humpty Dumpty's out in the world Humpty Dumpty had a great role and sources and all of these then couldn't put Humpty together again that's one of my favorites oh my god when things fall apart they stay apart right now here are two poems about death and dying and because I want to go through them a little bit quickly then and what's otherwise I've taken a liberty before we read each of the two poems pointing out the funeral imagery in them so I felt the funeral in my brain she's going to say mourners to and fro right mourners or funerals and it's a funeral in my brain a service like a drumcap beating beating she's going to say so there's drums you know at the funeral and and then I heard them lift a box which would be the coffin and lead boots it's the heaviness she'll say in the next poem this is the hour of lead it's a heavy time lead in the 19th century used to lie the coffins so that I look for a way to make out insects could you get in I don't know and then she's going to talk about the church bell tolling and then she's going to talk about the plank and which the coffin rests above grade involved in the funerals perhaps and then finally the coffin was lowered into the grave that's going to be the imagery of going to a funeral everybody says you'll see it in the poem I'm not trying to pull a fast one I felt a funeral in my brain so this is an internalized funeral as she's looking at it externally maybe it's not about a funeral it's about loss maybe it's about the onset of a horrendous headache I don't know but I felt a funeral in my brain all the imagery of this out of funerals and mourners too and throw kept treading treading till it seemed my sense was breaking that sense was breaking through I want you to pay attention to that why we're going to come back to that because I think it can be read two ways right oh my god the person is really dead sense is breaking through or as we will discover at the end of the poem maybe we drop beneath our being sensible and into a kind of madness and irrationality could be either one but mostly it seems like that sense was breaking through and when everybody was sitting down in the pews at the funeral and when they all were seated a service like a drum kept beating beating till I felt my mind was going numb right so we got these bam bam like a treading treading beating beating and there's this kind of numbness that surrounds her it's just too much sadness and then I heard them lift the box I suggested before that's the coffin and creak so instead of the drumming and the marching in now they're going just carefully back and creak across my soul with those boots of lead again and I think the poem becomes a proletive of this poem the space began to toll right as the bell ring bam bam the space began to toll as all the heavens were a bell and being but an ear I mean there's nothing in the world except the bell and being and it's taking it all in passively it's just taking it all in everything is noise so here was the question before about string so I just wanted to be quiet and she's wrecked by it just as when the bell bam bam wrecked silence she's wrecked too and I am silent some strange race wrecked solitary here the funeral she feels in her brain I don't know I mean I really don't know if this is the experience of the funeral but this is using funeral imagery to express her sense of loss and grief loss which a funeral is an example I just don't know it could be both and then she says this is where Emily Dickinson is beyond other parts and then a planking breeze and then a coffin and then a coffin is loaded wouldn't it be grave although in this case advice and then a planking breeze and I drop down and down in a world where every plunger finish rowing then she's still dropping now there's many years ago I read a psychoanalytic study Emily Dickinson which I now think it's entirely wrong but it caught me one great thing about Emily Dickinson which I think was entirely right is that there are aspects of our minds of what goes on in our hearts that there are aspects of us that are almost non-words and we just can't put them in words Jordan Millie Hopkins who wrote a couple years after Dickinson died said at the end of the son of oh mind, mind has Chris of all frightful may call me cheat may he are home there we'll have nightmares inside us and we can fall into depths of despair and despondent depression and sadness and the world and the incomprehensible and at the end of this poem Emily Dickinson is falling into something and the poem doesn't go where words can't follow right she says and then a planking breeze broke down and down and hit a road and every climb Jen finished now and then and she's still falling I wrote in the context of something else actually about a poet who writes about experiences that seem to be beyond words youth writing about concentrations I wrote recently on this list of poems I said that the last words of Ludwig Wittgenstein in a book of philosophy I don't remember what's much where we cannot speak we must be silent this poem trails off into a silence that is profound there she goes drops beneath reason life underneath reason let's go back to that line I said that sense was breaking through she's going beneath sense the sense is breaking through in the sense of the the loss but sense is also breaking through in the sense that she is going in her mind where words can't follow and what this psycho Alice who I mentioned before had to say was like you know we don't have anybody else in all history human beings who has tried to tell us this with as much clarity and precision of what it's like to find everything full in part this Emily Dickinson that she's the great explorer of the interior of our minds when they're pushed to their limits and so I mean that's the way I would read the end of that poem and we have another poem that the book I was referring to is called after great pain based on this next problem after great pain again the imagery is all from funerals right I notice that in our culture at least when people die people puts on their finances and they they walk in in their very ceremonies right and they're guided to their seats and nobody stands up and goes ahhh and nobody does that all ceremonies and this is about being extraordinary and stiff and time doesn't make any sense neither for her nor for the for the person who's died there's no longer in the world of time it's now in a different world whether it's the Calvinist world or whether it's just a dead world and people are mechanical and the mind will go about about walking and she says everything's grown wooden I don't think that's a reference I wouldn't wear a regardless court around a court's contentment like a stone you know the court's contentment court's contentment if you wanted to be handed and I offered you a court's contentment cold crystalline heart would you want it? probably not a court's contentment like a stone a stone is again maybe in reference to stones that are in cemeteries this is the hour of land she says again a reference to land which is a landing of coffins and also the heaviness of the hour and then there is a kind of an end and you'll be prepared for the ending of this poem because it's like the ending of the last poem you know how many other poems quite like these do after great pain we like to see in movies we see that right people get shot they go ahhhh pain she says a formal feeling comes the nerves sit ceremonious like tunes the stiff heart questions was it he that personally me myself that bore in yesterday or centuries before time doesn't matter anymore the feet is a great line mechanical go round round ear or thoughts after great pain we just go through stuff mechanically like we saw that from my time I increase my show and look at how she's going round round or air or what we do the things we have to do that we should do these are very different things round and air and what we do together a round or air or oughty and after great pain unlike what we would think and we would be ahhhh she says you know we kind of grow wooden we have courts like contentment right a wooden way regardless grown in courts contentment like a stone and in this brilliant last quote she says this is an hour of lay remembered if we can go back if we try to remember the pain if we get through it as freezing persons recollect the snow first chill that's still broken and you know letting go consciousness ends can't go any further it's a poem about and I think it brings true we don't like to think that that after pain we think we'll be in agony forever no there's a we have to keep going and do nice little journeys and keep going on yes can we go back sure there the feet mechanical go round of ground or air or ought I have a different interpretation of ought meaning zero nothing not ought we have to do that's fine I think you know the thing about a poem is it can push a line it goes a little bit so when she's reading Mrs. is ought zero yeah, it fits perfectly is it better than ought meaning you have to? I don't know do they both fit? yeah do you have to go on because you have to go on do you go on because it's empty and it's all around you either one they're not contradictory and even if they were contradictory here's the great thing about poems I really love poems when I was in college I thought maybe I should study philosophy problem with philosophy really the problem with philosophy is it entirely runs on something on a basic principle of logic called the wall, the excluded middle it's either A or not A it can't be both you know, I didn't talk to anything to give you both good morning I mean some of you maybe scientists some of you poor physicists have come to that point too where the very basic laws of physics are like could either be a particle or a wave they don't know but they're not sure and so in life we're sure about a lot of things but poems refer to the things where we're confused not only confused but where we sense more than one thing going on at a time so yes it can be ought the way you're reading it is zero fine they're not even contradictory yes I'm responding at least these last two poems with a feeling of oppressiveness and perhaps an understanding of depression which I don't have a personal understanding of you know, I've got a personal understanding yeah well first I would say the comment was about that these poems are bounded across in this that she finds difficult to understand I think that's part of the greatness of Emily Dickinson that is that that she is willing to address things and most of us would prefer not to address just how bad she is did she have her arm cut off? no did she have cancer and have to live with it? no did she live entire poverty? no but she felt great thank you and she's I think she's she's scrupulously exact in reporting that that's the second part of that none of us can speak for anybody else we all live inside our own heads I think almost all of us at some time feel that that life has hurt us badly or she were nothing means anything I don't think it's so rare I think what she's writing about is a part not all a part of human experience and I sometimes I thought Emily Dickinson for many many years and I sometimes wondered if I didn't emphasize too much the Emily Dickinson who feels all this great pain and didn't emphasize enough the Emily Dickinson who can be witty and funny about that the minister who comes to this old house or this I think there is something in Dickinson that speaks to the almost unspeakable in our experiences which have to do with depression despair, pain loss, everybody experiences loss, everybody once parents die once friends die the bicycle we will have gets thrown out by our parents I don't know but the experiences of loss and despair we all have to confront them and we have to answer on them and she doesn't that's what I really love in her is this willingness to confront directly what so many of us maybe want to walk away from yeah and then I'm going to do one more poem and then when we're done you can ask me questions can you wait? is that okay? oh this is easy two more poems I love the first half this was a poet she apparently was writing about Edison actually he was not nearly as good a poet as she was she liked his essays she liked his poems this was a poet it is still an amazing sense from ordinary media she's writing about funerals in the town she's writing about tying her hat she's writing about going to a funeral or using the imagery of funerals which are very common in 19th century America from ordinary means this still is an amazing sense from ordinary means the metaphor is of making perfume right distilling something down to its essence and at her that's a pure perfume so immense from the familiar species that perished by the door we wonder if it was now ourselves that arrested it before and she's not going to use stuff that's far away you know what her names are made from in her day the organs of wild cats and tubers and whales and stuff like that she's never just going to use the dead ones outside the house or maybe the daffodils I don't know but she's sexy so she's going to read herself in her own place I'm writing something which I'll send down to my list and when you've signed up the sheet that's gone around and you'll get it by French poet named Joachim Dubelle he says I want to come home I want to write about my neighbor's sleep I'm tired and marble of Rome I want to write about what's right beside my door so suddenly Dickinson and then we'll come to your question one of the large questions she wrote 1776 poems published in her lifetime sent some to this magazine editor Thomas Wentworth he said your gait is stasmotic your rhythms aren't so good and she sent another couple to actually this woman liked her poems one of the major feminist poets of the later 19th century she published a few of them in anthology mostly she was unpublished tied her poems up neatly did she know she was such a good poet did she have any idea I think she did and so we're going to end up with this poem which is called the bronze and blaze and it's about you all know this because you live in Vermont not all of you but if you live in Burlington like I do you'll never know it it's about the northern lights how many of you have seen the northern lights you'll know right here's some pictures of the northern lights these are really spectacular pictures I got from the lab like you've all seen them or most of you have seen them there's a really spectacular one fantastic so we know from a letter she wrote that the northern lights appeared about Amherst messages it's on a particular day and her dog barked and her father rang the bell in the town and got everybody out of bed so they could see these marvelous northern lights and Amherst messages and that's why she's going to talk about warms that's the bell that her father rang a bronze and blaze the north nights so adequately it forms so preconcerned with itself so distant to warms people all see the northern lights they seem to have their own logic and they go their own way and it doesn't matter what we say or do here on earth they do their thing that seems reasonable and concerns so sovereign the universe or me the northern lights just do their thing and nothing we can do stops them and no matter how the bell ringing by her father can slow them down infects and she says I look at those lights and I get infected by this gigantic show they put on infects my simple spirit with paints and majesty I'd like to be like them universal playing that before the whole world and women shouldn't be doing it right so with paints and majesty and I try to do with them the northern lights do I try to put on a show right till I take vaster attitudes and strut upon my stem but she's rooted to the earth right she's got a stem disdaining hand and a woman blow it and oxygen for arrogance and oh I could do this and I could do it really well I'm as good as northern lights and she says my splendors are menagerie now you all know what a menagerie is it's a little show that people put on it's kind of evil my splendors are menagerie my poems but they're completely show who could compete with the northern lights up there in the sky but they're completely show will entertain the centuries I have long ago in Highland we had this hundred crafts who none but Beatles know I've got to be a law of Montana to understand but this is ironic right the northern lights are still here family difference long dead and gone it is true but you've all seen the northern lights that last for half an evening her poems are still with us this was written in the 1860s we were reading it in 2019 so there's a sense in which she understands that oh she will die and she will be dead the universe keeps going on it does say that but it also says something else it says that what she has done these invitations of the northern lights including this poem went on long after the northern lights have stopped those particular northern lights so she has both ways she is both mortal and has an ending unlike the northern lights and she has a length of accomplishment that's way way greater than any display of the northern lights now I'm done you first and then you second I'm kind of confused on our program an island is on a grass but Daisy is now I've got a couple of things wrong in this it's uh there's a mistake in one of these lines your thing is wrong I get it does it say Daisy? I think it's Beatles I'm pretty sure it's Beatles I could check it out but it's thank you for catching me up on that I made a mistake I'm one or the other but it still makes sense in a way right that northern lights are still with us and she's dead but those particular northern lights are gone and her poems are still with us so but thank you and I cut you off well I'm just trying to figure out how to imagine this as many different answers there's people in the room what motivated her it doesn't seem to be the money because she wasn't turning them out to give a money for them evidently she was born with a solo spoon in her mouth she wasn't how did she live in a beautiful house like that without having to income it's kind of an illusion we have her father was an influential and wealthy lawyer and her brother was an influential and wealthy lawyer and she was an unmarried girl in the house and she took care of her father and her mother and I'm not sure you would want to trade your life for taking care of your parents all their lives I'm not sure that that's quite silver spoon-ish she had enough food but that's not quite silver spoon the question of motivation is a very very hard one I was talking with some friends beforehand the story of the publication of her poems is pretty amazing she sent some poems off to this guy who is an editor for magazine Thomas Wentworth figures and her niece maybe these poems are pretty good so they published the version and they kind of modularized them they changed them so they grind better and they put punctuation instead of all these dashes and they shifted things around and then a better version came out that's more attuned to what she actually wrote with dashes and then an even better version came out but the most recent version pointed out what has become very clear to scholars which is that almost all these poems were copied out in fair copies in classical classical she made little books and she sewed together the books with little bits of yarn she was a self published the poems didn't know what you were but in her door and it wasn't doing it for money the question of fame is harder but one of the really difficult things about Emily is that she was just a really good poet she's writing in the middle of the 19th century you know who wrote poems in the middle of the 19th century nice it wasn't much room for women poets but they were going to be sanctum mental they were not going to write about nature without her dying them and it is thought nobody knows for sure that when she sent these poems off to the editor she was a romantic poetry editor she was kind of testing because they were all good technologists and he gave him some credit he knew there was something extraordinary in them he thought they were good enough to publish so I mean she was stuck she was a a woman poet in the 19th century that wouldn't acknowledge women could be great poets and why did she write it's a very good question you know even if people tell us we don't know if we believe them yes I know some people that before they give away their books they have to go through them again for fear that they would lose something but then they'll go out maybe she wanted to go back but the question is why did she do it in the first place why did she write all these books why did she put them into little books that she published herself and I think that she didn't burn them when she died you know I have to understand that but I think we have a desire to make things of our life and I think she tells us in enough of these times that carefully observing the world was her way of going forward in the world and so she made these careful observations it's what she could do with what she had which was a life that had suffered tremendous if we believe her poems which I do tremendous loss I mean she also had poems of happiness some of her poems are actually very sexual I mean sexual congress with anybody her poems are about friendship she put poems in letters why do people do anything those are very good questions really you're asking a very good question why did she do it I think she didn't publish widely because there was no place for a woman in the 19th century to publish like she did especially if they were on the cutting edge of poetry there's no other poet in the 19th century who is a woman who compares to her there may be no other woman poet of all time who compares to her there may be no poet period who compares to her she's an extraordinary poet yet she wrote in a kind of privacy we have other examples you know Kafka wrote most of what he wrote and he wanted to burn when he died and his friends said I wouldn't have lost what we need if he wanted to burn he knows I admire him I'll publish him so Max wrote published Kafka and Hopkins didn't want his poems to publish his friends published them yes I assume the question is how could she not publish I mean everyone here probably we're all here for poetry all of us have probably scribbled a few lines here and there and we may have had trouble with but you know what it feels like when you write something that kind of makes its way through very difficult stuff simply and easily just a few words is magical so I mean she's still like that wonderful section where about how can we bear that the knees come and I'd rather I mean I love how she's going along and then she just goes off into that that piece about that makes no sense if we'd be too tall to cause one could stretch it just really makes no sense I love that I love that she just wanders off a cliff in a sense and then lands adroitly and starts again let me argue against you although I agree with you no I do not everybody is good with words it's good with words I went to the marbles of going to another country and I got to France and it's so hard to learn the language or I don't think you're fortunate over in India you won't understand the word little kids can speak it so I'll have language but not everybody is so good with words I love music a lot and I take composing it so she had she was willing to forge in herself the capacity to use words Joyce says near the end of portrait of the artist that I go the forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race a student analyst as I not everybody is willing to do that work not everybody has that talent so not everybody can be a poet with words I read something to the Vermont State Legislature today from Warwick and he says everybody if you practice being a good person can make your own life a poet he's pretty astonishing too so I don't know if everybody can make poems and have that great real I don't know we all have language but she had an extraordinary capacity and I related and I'm not the expert here I've read a lot of Emily Dickinson I thought a lot of Emily Dickinson but she wouldn't come down into the so I don't know I think it has to do with what she said in that comic she has to be scrupulously exact because it's the only way she can get through and I think that's part of why she writes poems I think as this poem chose I think she knew she had the capacity to make of the world she lived in a recreation of it a simulacrum that was not as good as the real thing and yet in some ways it's better than the real thing because it lasts and it's captured and it's there for us to understand in a poem I love greatly by Reiner Maria Wilka we know how the Jesus that's what the world wants is to be put into words for things to turn into consciousness maybe that's what the world needs I don't know I'm a little stunned before the idea that she could do this I do agree with you she needed to do it people can do it there's a great sense of accomplishment in doing it whether they are published or not whether you make money or not I think in my heart if she could have been published if she could have got quite a claim I think she might have liked that I don't think the world was ready for her in 1863 when she wrote musty's poems or even 1880 I told somebody before I talked I read in a book Emily Dickinson is the greatest woman poet of all time well anybody want to propose another there's Sappho Sappho was a very great poet he invented a lot of what we think and feel Sappho wrote in Greece and we have exactly one complete extant poem of hers and all the rest are fragments and their little fragments means a half a line or a line 20th century I have a couple of poets I have a great partisan of a Russian poet named Hanat Matava who I think is almost Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop I love Elizabeth but you know Emily Dickinson you could take Elizabeth it's not a matter of just a quantity but you could take Elizabeth Pushup's poems in one hand and put Emily Dickinson's poems in the other she wrote so many great poems not many backwards I don't know I'm a great admirer of Elizabeth Bishop I'm glad he never minded of Elizabeth Bishop could we just spend a minute on craft yeah talk about all those dashes yes you read through a lot of them and brought the meaning that I hadn't been able to find because you read through the dashes but she put them in there dashes are a part of problem with Dickinson the first versions of Dickinson the ones that came out in the first three editions so increasingly more poems put punctuation in think about punctuation it gives us directions to do things stop, pause excited so I think she managed to avoid all that avoid deciding finally what these lines should be and I don't know I don't know what to do about it I write that myself I use a lot of dashes when I write I say I got the dashes because who wants so many dashes I don't think of our my works in night that's how the works came out of her not quite nice she put them with great craft into four line stanzas and that rhyme stands and meaning that doesn't four line stanzas the dashes are just part of how she did things it means you pause after each one this has been a really fast hour nap one more question one more question and then I'll stand around and not avoid the question of dashes yes pardon me that's what we could have too I want to use the word I don't want to use the word depression but I wanted to I was thinking about the fact that in our culture we have such a go get them perfect yourself self help culture that many people who suffer depression mask it totally and I was thinking that Emily Dickinson of course lived in a certain orthodoxy and her vision of sort of isolation and alienation might have been very heretical something that she needed to um in a way uh um work through in her own way because the religious milieu was not gonna if her fate did not make all of these issues perfectly not sustained right and so I had a source of not shame but a need to protest her own meaning counter to the prevailing I think we some of you might disagree but you're not to believe what I say a lot more depression and despair than we have in March we're adrift in alcohol and opioids we have huge numbers of uh young people seem more alienated and depressed than ever so that people are so shocked when Dickinson is writing about something that runs very deep with many people at times in their lives they're moments of great joy they're moments of a feeling of connection and belonging she can write about those too but they're also these moments of despair and wondering how we go on I'm making poor maybe a little too quickly everybody's parents died how do we go on when we suffer loss and grief how do we continue I have several friends who they say I can't think of anything more so I've outlived their children how do we go on Dickinson speaks to that and it's much more common than we like to acknowledge because we live in a technicolor world everybody's happy and everything is okay and it's not so that's and I think and she doesn't mask that she doesn't mask any of that put a pretty face on it she does not we had thank you