[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
The cosmos runs away from us carrying us in its expanding body with its billions of galaxies.
It's untold crush of stars and their numberless planetary spheres, each of which hangs there in mostly empty space, remote and isolated, rotating, spinning, sometimes swerving and falling, almost never coming into direct contact with another sphere, illuminated mostly by borrowed light, if at all.
It's part of what we call the visible universe, but only a tiny fraction of which is actually visible, while the whole drifts in an inscrutable sea of dark matter, surrounded by vast eddies of dark energy, known to us not in themselves but only by conjecture.
Or let me put it differently.
Emily Dickinson.
Silence must be clear.
All day when I swim with another.
I feel like I'm too well turned.
I'm so excited.
I feel like I'm too young.
Nothing can be held on to for very long.
That is the baso-contino of the universe, which makes the souls-strained instrument resound.
There's a vacancy at the heart of even the fullest moments, just as there's a void at the heart of even the most brilliant and busy galaxies.
This empty space of separation, spatial as well as temporal, forms the hollow body of the poet's lyre, which sings of singularities.
Time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.
Space is what time makes room for, so that there can be this one tree unlike any other, so that there can be this one Emily Dickinson, utterly idiosyncratic, and at the same time other times.
At the same time utterly emphatic.
Hers is the speech that moves us even when we fail to understand it.
She is the orpheus of the soul's intentability.
She is the planetary sphere whose body we never touch, yet whose enigmatic music reaches us across the empty expanses of time and space.
She is the world of perceptions falling back into the upper-on, and she is the topic of our show today.
Since Emily Dickinson has a way of dumb-founding me and inspiring me with awe, I'm especially happy to welcome to our program a special guest who knows how to speak about Dickinson without disfiguring her singularity or betraying her idiosyncrasy.
My guest is Katie Peterson, who I met on one previous occasion about a year ago, and if our conversation today about Emily Dickinson bears any resemblance to the one we had a year ago, we're in for quite a treat. Katie, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me, Robert.
Let me start with a bit of biography. You were born in Menlo Park here nearby in California.
You graduated from Stanford in 1996 with a degree in English literature, after which you went on to Harvard for a doctorate in English and American literature, and you actually did your dissertation on Emily Dickinson, correct?
That's right, I spent seven and a half, eight years with her writing that thesis.
Which is titled "Supposeed Person," Emily Dickinson and the selflessness of poetry, which I have not read, but the title itself seems to suggest to me that you might not believe that she was actually a person.
Well, that title actually comes from a quote from one of her letters. When she writes to Hagenson, Thomas Wentworth, Hagenson, her editor, and she says to him, "When I state myself as representative of the verse, I do not mean me, but a supposed person."
That kind of enigmatic statement is what got me going on Dickinson at the beginning.
Great, and that dissertation of yours actually was awarded the Howard Mufford Jones Prize for the best thesis during the year of its completion.
You're also the author of a number of articles on Emily Dickinson, including an article that you co-wrote with the poet Brenda Hillman that appeared in the Emily Dickinson Journal.
And also, I guess I consider you first and foremost a poet rather than a scholar or commentator on Emily Dickinson. You have a book of poetry of your own called "This One Tree" and maybe later in our conversation I might ask you if that title of yours, this one tree contains an Aristotelian illusion of sorts.
In any case, you've been the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies, and you've been teaching for the last few years at Deep Springs College in Inyo County, California, but you have just received, I take it a bunting fellowship to go to Radcliffe for a year, is that right?
That's right, I'll be writing poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study next year.
Terrific.
So on the question of the idea of personhood, Emily Dickinson is a poet that on the one hand presents a huge resistance to all of her readers, at least certainly to me, when it comes to trying to penetrate into the intimate core of selfhood that she was all about, we have her words to go through.
There's at the same, how do you understand the strange dynamic which in her poetry, at least on the one hand invites the reader to try to probe a deep core of selfhood, and at the same time, her poetry has all these defense mechanisms that prevent us from actually gaining access to that space.
I think the way to start thinking about it is to think about imagining selfhood without ego in some way.
Dickinson has a phrase going out upon circumference, and she talks a lot about circumference when she talks about the act of perception.
So you have to imagine the intimate selfhood of a life in which perception itself takes you out of the self.
So if you think about seeing and hearing as vectors, as opposed to thinking about them as actions situated in an eye in a first person, what you think about are these fragmentary parts of the self that seem to want to go out into the world and immerse themselves in it in some way.
I think there's an intense amount of discomfort in language for Dickinson, and yet it's the only medium that she can see herself existing in completely.
And so there's a twinning of necessity and difficulty when it comes to just undertaking a simple and active perception as looking at a slant of light or hearing insects sing in a lawn.
When you say that, can I ask a naive question, is it your impression that she had a desire to get beyond the world of mere words into an immediate sort of contact with the thing itself to use a phenomenological term?
And that therefore her relationship to language has an undercurrent of animosity or a certain sort of aggression about the fact that she's trapped in the world of words, or on the do you believe that she was more of a more typical poet who was just completely in love with words and was completely at home in the medium of language?
I think that you need to look at her relationship with silence and of all of our great poets, especially our 19th century poets, but of all of our great poets, it's Dickinson that shows us the power of silence in a poem, both through her dashes and through her stanza breaks through her lack of titles.
And the way I always read that, because I read her lack of titles as being an incredibly positive choice, a choice to give us an ungovernable poem or an ungovernable text, a text that only we as singular entities can operate without operating instructions.
And so the first account you gave is of animosity, and I don't think it's always that, but I do think there's a great relief in silence for Dickinson.
And that often the silence at the end of a poem marks not the failure of the language, but the greatest proximity one can get to the entity that she's trying to go towards.
And of all of her perceptions, they're linked, I think, to this journey towards the divine or towards metaphysical meaning, if you want a strip it of a religious context, I think that's impossible, but I'm trying to include those of us who are atheists in that spiritual crusade.
Yeah, it doesn't have to be the divine per se, it could be the sacrality of the world in its givenness, phenomenological embodied, givenness.
And if I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that her silences or the way that there's something intimating in the poem, something that intimates towards either the divine or this transcendent world of embodied objects and things.
That this would make her poetry, at least ideally speaking, transitive vis-a-vis the world.
A number of scholars and critics and lovers of Dickinson, of course, are completely obsessed with the poems themselves as things in a non-transitive way, you know.
And we might as well get out of the way this huge sort of phenomenon about the very materiality of these poems. We call them poems, but some people are not even persuaded that their poems per se, that their poems and a lot more than that, in so far as there's a lot more than just a cluster of words, these words have come to us, have been transmitted by her in material media.
And there's a reason for that, there's a very good reason for that. And I think you have to imagine what it would have been like for her sister, Livinia, who she lived with, after Dickinson's death, to open up that trunk at the foot of her bed.
And when you go to her house and amorous, you can see the trunk itself, you can see the place.
And to find not just pages of poems, but these small books that are sewn together with thread in which these poems are represented in this incredibly light, almost gourlish script.
And what's true about the poems is that when they're represented in these books that the critics call, fascicles, many of the important words in the poems, an asterisk is used at the end of the word, and then at the bottom of the poem, that asterisk, there are other options for the words she could have chosen.
So there's one poem in which she says, "When what we speculate has been and thoughts we cannot know, more intimate with us become than persons that we know." And that word "speculate" has an asterisk.
It's not really an asterisk, it's almost like a sideways cross. And at the bottom of the page, instead of "speculate," she puts "can not know."
So there's two texts happening at the same time. Sometimes there are two or three variants. It's sometimes not just one.
In addition, she sent many of these poems as letters to her friends who became like the strange editorial "coterie" for her. And many of these poems have different versions as they go to her friends. She sent many of them for different occasions.
She sent them for birthdays and for funerals and for holidays. And so the meaning of the poem is charged with seasonal or holiday meaning depending on when the letter gets sent.
Yeah, and of course this is what I find irresistible about her is that there's the affirmation of the possibility of variation where there is no stabilization of a final poem.
It's a big relief from the kind of French high-modernist, like Malat Me, and Vallejo, who were striving for this perfect poem where and whose kind of religious doctrine of poetry was Lumos used the right word that for every given sentence or description there is one right word for the phrase.
And when you read Emily Dickinson, what you find is that Lumos used could be any number of words, each one of which changes in a certain sense of the meaning or refraction of the poem. And she didn't seem bothered by that at all.
She didn't seem bothered by that, and she also didn't seem, I think that's connected to this idea that a poem could have multiple uses too.
It's not multiple meanings, it's a very different thing than ambivalence and indeterminate and so it's almost like an essayistic exercise in poetry where seen from one point of view, it's this, seen from another point of view, it's something else.
That's right. And I think there's some relationship with you, you talked at the beginning about what the relationship these poems want to have what the reader is. And there's a sense right at the beginning that there's an unfriendliness and unfriendliness sometimes about the poems.
But I also think that this openness to what a reader wants to use the poem for and how a reader wants to use the poem is as if there's something in Dickinson that predicts a reader past her historical context. It almost predicts a 21st century reader, it predicts a more mystical reader not in time in some way.
This goes back to something you said earlier about the lack of titles and you said that there's something ungovernable, there's an ungovernability about her refusal or just the fact that she chose to omit titles which were framing devices, which usually work as acts of governance on the part of the author of a poem.
A title tells you what to do. It does. Right. And she doesn't want to tell you what to do. And so when Livina found the fascicles, she didn't find a bunch of titled poems and what's become a lingua franca of Dickinson framing and publication is to refer to the poems by their first lines and to publish them under their first lines.
And I think a lot of critics much prefer this uncanny and slightly alienating numbering system that has gotten all confused by different Dickinson editions. But there's something about it that makes more sense than referring to them by the first lines.
So in that trunk that Livina found, there were not only the fascicles, but there were also poems written on envelopes of letters, unsealed on...
That's right.
Do you think this was also deliberate? Do you think there was a certain concern for the materiality of the medium that caused her not to take clean sheets of paper and write those poems?
It's hard for me also to think about any poet, the 20th century poet, the reneutic, or another one of these poets who's lived so deeply in the habitual, in the daily ordinariness of life.
I imagine Dickinson too have been the same kind of frugal end of string saver as many of her Yankee ancestors. And so to have enjoyed writing on the backs of things, I often write on that.
I wonder about this about me and Dickinson, I often write on the backs of papers that already have things written on them. And I know part of the psychic reason why I do that is because it takes the pressure off in some way.
You don't have to just go to the white paper. You go to something that's sort of already done.
And when you think about her copying those poems into those classical books, I think there's a similar sense of that.
But all of these papers are so much more, I hate to say that they're more beautiful than the paper we use, but there's something about them where the attention is given not just to what's written on them, but the thing itself.
And so a lot of these things, there is a poem that she kept sending that she ultimately sends with a grasshopper inside the poem to Mabel Loomis Todd, her brother's mistress.
And there's something Macabre about that, right? And the materiality of these papers is also about their perishability that she keeps trying to write the infinite on something finite seems to be a very Dickinsonian part of this manuscript situation.
And I think that's why my leading I was trying to insist on the ultimate intention, ability and evidence of everything that's caught in time, which is something that she was particularly sensitive to in so far as themes like death and loss and a yearning for immortality in some form or another, pervade a lot of her poetry now.
That's right, she said the immortality was the flood subject, the greatest subject.
So when you said that she wrote almost as if for a 21st century reader and we talked about the ungovernor ability and the fact that she did not presume to adopt the author's monarchical's posture of having total control over the artifact.
And a certain sense, renouncing mastery. It's not also the case that the figure of the master is hugely important in a number of her poems. She calls him seniority or, you know, my master Lord.
And a lot of speculation has gone into who the master may be ultimately is it just kind of figurative figure of speech for Jesus Christ or death in some cases or real individuals.
How do you understand that body of her work, that subset of her work, which is commonly referred to as the master poems?
The master letters are three letters found with the with the poems that address this person you're talking about and they're these incredibly vibrant and very erotic letters.
There's one in which she says, master you put the water over the dam in my brown eyes.
And another one, she makes this kind of pledge that she'll go through any amount of pain for the master. She says, I've got a tomahawk in my side, but that don't hurt me much.
It almost sounds like a line from back a radio hat or something like that. It's terrific. But the whole letter is as litany of I would go through excruciating pain only that I get to keep my set of feelings for you.
And so, biographically, there's a great amount of evidence that in that time in her life, there was this figure who's a married man, a priest, who moves to San Francisco, who comes to see her once.
And there's some evidence that it's a person, but the lineage of those letters in the work and in the letters themselves, which are something between a delightfully charismatic and zany essay and a poem, they're not just a letter for that occasion. Again, this is a piece of writing for many uses, not just for the thing it was used for.
The lineage is that of a figure of authority to whom one is both obedient and disobedient, in which these currents of self-governance become an ungoverned subjectivity that needs this master figure in order to provide a foil or an agon for it to sort of find its way into.
Are you persuaded it was this real person? What was his name?
Charles Wadsworth.
Yeah.
It's such a one who visited her and then went away saying that he felt so nervously exhausted.
No, that was Hagansson. That was Hagansson.
That was the editor and it's funny because she uses the term master right after. So she's had this thing, you know, love affair of some kind.
And she writes in right after that, it's the timing is very interesting. So right after that, like a year later, she gets involved with Thomas Wadsworth, Hagansson.
She's saying he's the editor of the Poetry Editor, the Atlantic Monthly. She sends him some poems and he asked her some personal questions and she says,
"I had a terror since last September that I could tell to no one. So I sing now as the boy does by the burying ground as if I were afraid."
And there's some evidence that that love affair and a kind of nervous collapse happened around the same time that after that, she began to write some of these incredibly great poems that we think of as these totemic
Dickinson poems, like I heard a fly buzz when I died and many of the poems about love.
And so this master figure that sort of happens in her life, she uses the term master to address Hagansson later too.
And in some of the later poems, there seems to be another master, but this idea of mastery as being a force that she's in dialogue with seems like one of the lineages of these expologies experience.
Would you find that pertinent to her encounter with him in person when he came to visit her and it was a highly choreographed sort of performance on her part from what I understand, no?
That's right. And so she was almost trying to, I don't know if you're going too far to say that she was trying to master the situation by keeping this guy so unsettled through her unpredictable behavior and postures.
Well, we know so well, I think that passive aggression is such a powerful form of aggression and passivity is never just passive.
So what did she do on that?
She wore her white, that was when she'd be unwaring, a white dress all the time and she wore a white dress and she came in 15 minutes late into the drying room.
At least that's what her sister says and her sister is a count of the situation and she thrusts a white lily into his hands and says, "These are for you."
And begins talking in a hurried voice about poetry and life and everything and that's this performance is this kind of the interior life made formal.
Almost a private life made slightly public in the private zone or something like that.
But her ex-entricity and her charisma, yeah, at the end of the day, he gets in the right to let her to his wife and says, "It was exhausting and I hope I don't have to talk to her again for a very long time."
Because she must have also been very needy too, living in that small town with intellectual friends, it was 19th century America.
She was an upper-class woman so she certainly had access to those experiences and ideas, but to have a soulmate, right, to have a friend as the poet Thomas Solomon says, "To have a friend."
The greatest predicament is to have a friend and that seemed to be a predicament that she suffered her entire life.
However, however close she got to certain people.
At what point did she make a decision to become a total recluse?
Well, it's difficult to say, but it was in her early 30s that she and there are some stories about the last times.
The last time she went out was at 11 o'clock one night to see the new church that it hadn't been built.
And another story is that she had been out with some friends late and she came home and her father yelled at her and she said,
"Well, that I'm never going out again," right?
And that there was some element of trying to keep her promise.
Both her parents were sick in her 30s and so there was some element of taking care of them.
But the consecration to verse and to poetry and the consecration to becoming a recluse were the same.
They had some relation to each other.
So what would happen in the Dickinson House was that they would have parties and Dickinson would send down a poem to be read or a letter or a statement of
how she felt that day or something like that.
And she would again, this thing with the grasshopper sending a poem, sending this material, this piece of your representing yourself instead of sending yourself is a way of highly controlling other people's access to you.
Definitely. And speaking to people from behind a closed door.
That's right.
From her room.
Yeah.
A very eccentric indeed.
And asking people to come play the piano for her while she was not there in the room.
And her sister would usher them into the piano.
And I find that this theatricality is internalizing a lot of the poetry.
And we talk about the absence of titles and framing structures.
And many of her poems have first lines that stage themselves as definitions.
That's right.
But are they really definitions or is she just using a kind of theatrical device by which she's subverting the very concept of a framing definition?
Well, the thing to do is to take a look at a couple of these definitions.
So one of them, the one that's coming to my mind immediately is a poem.
The difference between despair and fear is like the difference between the moment of the wreck and when the wreck has been.
Right. And that definition is so loaded on both sides.
Right. It's got heaviness on both sides that you're sort of ushered into the metaphor as opposed to ushered out of it.
And that's one strategy she has in a definition of complicating while being definitional in her thinking using the definition to complicate meaning as opposed to simplify it.
And the other one I'm thinking of is a poem where she begins almost in the school-teacherally vain.
This tone that she sometimes falls back on is a tone of authority.
We do not play on graves because there isn't room.
And you want to say, "Emily, that's not the reason why we don't play on graves.
We don't play on graves. We don't play in the cemetery."
But of course, the first thing is we all play in the cemetery.
And you hasn't played in the cemetery.
But the second thing is this idea that there's a reason for everything.
Right. That seems like the form of the poems and then the content of the poems absolutely wants to subvert that.
There isn't a reason for everything.
No. And then there's that great line in one of her poems about where the internal meanings are.
Something is ripped apart.
Do you want to--
There's a certain slant of light.
Yes. Why don't we have a look at that.
Okay, let's look at that. Do you want me to read that poem?
Yes, please.
That's a poem I know, so I don't even have to look at how to read it.
Okay.
I'll look at my text here and you can recite it by memory.
I can correct you if you're--
Okay, that's great.
There's a certain slant of light winter afternoons.
That oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt, it gives us.
We can find no scar.
But internal difference where the meanings are.
None may teach it, any.
It is the seal, despair, and imperial affliction sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens.
Shadows hold their breath.
When it goes to, like, the distance on the look of death.
Yeah, let me ask you first, Katie, whether this is a question of variance,
because you said that oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.
Mm-hmm.
Mine--
My addition says, like, the weight of cathedral tunes.
You said, "None may teach it any."
Of course, mine just says, "None may teach it anything."
Let me see.
Yours has dashes there as well.
Are these just variance--
And it's an editorial decision?
This is a very interesting question.
And there's actually more than one thing behind the difference between my addition and yours.
And the first thing is, is that this poem to you has variance.
And I think weight is one of the variance.
So I think when you look at the text of this poem, you'll see that little asterisk.
And you'll see at the bottom the word weight.
But none may teach it anything.
The difference between that and my version is in this book that I have here,
the Franklin Reader's Edition, which is taken directly from the fact.
Similarly, we have none may teach it dash any.
The capitalized any, which is how it's represented in the actual manuscript.
And one of the other besides Dickinson herself toying with her manuscripts,
after she died, in order to get them published quickly,
Maybellum is taught her brother's mistress, who is married to David Todd,
the local Amherst astronomer, Austin, her brother had married Dickinson's best friend, Susan.
So there's a lot of tension.
The publication happened in the strange way where Livinia brought the manuscript over to Susan.
And then she felt like Susan wasn't getting it not fast enough, so she brings them over to Maybell.
And Maybell gets them published really fast in this book, "Bults of Melody."
I think the title is published in the early teens.
But she changes the editors and Maybell both change a lot of things,
because the poems seem too ungovernable, the way they are to be read by a common reader.
And so you have an incredible difference in the line, "None may teach it any, and none may teach it anything."
Because in this poem, "None may teach it any," there's this incredible openness where you could interpret that as saying,
"We're talking about this land of light, and it seems to adhere to it syntactically."
"None may teach it any," and you think, "Well, any may teach it."
It could mean that, right?
And in this edition, there's no way it could mean that.
Also because there are no dashes, and the dash has a force in this poem,
and in many of her other poems, that gives it that openness onto multiple possibilities.
That almost is what a slant is, no?
In fact, this is a question of literary criticism.
I should know the answer to this, but we speak about slant rhyme, and Emily Dickinson is full of slant rhymes.
I don't know if that term was in use at the time that she was writing, but if it were, it might give a whole other sort of valence to this idea that there's a certain slant of light.
No, that's so true.
And she loves the word slant.
There's the poem, "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant, success in circuit lies."
And she goes on in the middle of the poem to talk about how you need to be circuitous in the way that you represent what you call the truth.
And at the end, she says, "The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind."
And so I wonder, too, whether that term slant rhyme was a term.
In the same way that I wonder whether or not when she near rhymed things or badly rhymed things,
there's a way in which it could either be just doing things wrong again and again, right?
One, it's to sound wrong to the ear, or is it trying really hard to make it sound right and being unable to?
Well, certainly there's a certain slant of light on winter afternoons that are presses like the weight of cathedral tunes.
I can talk a lot about that, but haven't really hurt, it gives us, we can find no scar.
But internal difference where the meanings are.
And fortunately for me, anyway, neither you nor I is a deconstructionist because then we could just write 150 pages on the idea of internal difference and meaning and scars and moon.
But we don't...
As many have, right? There's a... I'm sure there's a... about this poem.
One thing I know about this poem is that linguists talk about this poem, tons of people talk about this poem precisely because of what you're talking about.
But what's so striking to me about that moment is this idea, "Heavenly heard it gives us, we can find no scar."
And so what she wants to do is put these little humans in the poem looking for a scar.
We've just had the celestial metaphysical experience of seeing light, but the first thing she wants to do is embody, to turn us back to our bodies and say, "Well, all of us and we're looking for a scar on us."
And how silly and strange we are as people that we do things like that, and yet of course we do.
But don't you take it that there's been a deeply spiritual wounding?
And it's precisely that it doesn't not leave a scar that's visible or crazy.
Yeah, but we didn't skin our knees.
Right.
And it's like we didn't.
But it's like "Heavenly heard."
Because it's a heavenly heard, right?
Yeah.
That's great.
And let me invoke another poem because this is part of my experience of reading Emily Dickinson to this constant experience of feeling like,
"Okay, if I spend enough time on one poem, I feel like I've gotten it."
And usually when you start understanding how one poem works in the corpus of a poet, and you read the next one, you spend a lot of time, then you start getting a pattern and you start understanding all the other poems to follow.
In Emily Dickinson's case, I've never had this experience of saying, "Well, I can build on my quasi-familiarity with one poem that I move to the next one, and it's just as strange."
As if it were written by an alien, no?
So, here's one which is numbered 1, 4, 4, 6 in the Franklin Reader's edition, which reads as follows,
"Water makes many beds for those of verse to sleep.
It's awful chamber, open stands.
It's curtains, blandly sweep.
A parent is the rest in undulating rooms whose amplitude no end invades whose axis never comes."
So, I read that and I just have to stare at it as if it were a hieroglyph, which it is.
A hieroglyph is a wonderful way to represent what it is first, right?
Because there's a level of compression that happens.
So, if you think back to the other poem you looked at, when it goes to the distance on the look of death, now, the question you ask is,
"What is the look of death?"
And many have said, "It's the look on a dead person."
So, what we instantly want to do is translate that into something we can see and understand,
but these poems also have these assumptions that we should be able to see and understand different metaphors and ways of experiencing the world.
So, whose amplitude no end invades is that the line?
Yes.
Whose axis never comes.
And so, there's a straight assumption, an almost psychotic assumption, right?
That there's this condition of being in which an axis comes, that we should have already understood
to understand the exceptionalism of a situation in which an axis doesn't come.
And of course, we haven't been given that in the poem.
What we've been given is a poem from the center of things.
We've been given a poem from the sort of white-hot center of the condition in which the assumptions behind this way of describing the world are implicit.
There's sort of their water makes many beds.
That's a definitional too, right?
It's hard to know what it means because we have, on the one hand, an element we understand and we have a thing we understand, bed.
She's not talking about a water bed.
So, what is it that she's talking about?
It's metaphorical in some way, but there's also a deep experience at the heart of the poem that seems quite present.
So, unlike, I think, an explicative neurotic who seems to want to keep finding the right words for something and keep generating an explanation,
what she wants to generate instead is almost like a little boat or a little carriage, like a little vehicle in which we have to sit,
in which we have to sort of a bed in which we have to lie down.
And I like the fact that there's this bed in the poem too because in almost every Dickinson poem that I know of, there's a body, there's a bed, or there's a coffin.
There's a container for a body and there's a body and the body itself is also a container.
And so, even though we don't get a person in this poem, there's this sense of like a bed being this container that we're supposed to step in to and access being this thing that we should understand that an access should come.
It's quite obvious, right?
An access should come.
And of course, before we read the poem, we had no idea that an access should come.
We never thought about our lives in terms of an access.
Didn't even occur to us.
Well, just on the first order of meaning, I'm already halted by even the last line whose access never comes where she's taking a substantive, not only a substance, but that which structures substances, an access, and turns it into an event.
That's something which comes or doesn't come in this case.
And that's already something that I have to just sit there and ponder.
Why is this access something that needs to come?
It's either structuring or it's not structuring.
What does it mean to, for people, a verse to sleep?
Let's say we admit that sleep has some kind of relationship to death.
It's a state of being dead.
Those who are a verse to sleep would be those who are a verse to death.
What kind of bed does water provide for those people?
What does floating?
And what is this horizontality that you're referring to either a coffin, a bed, a body?
How does it relate also to the horizontality of the dash that you were speaking about earlier?
And water which is, it perforce, invokes some kind of horizontality unless you're speaking about a waterfall, but you cannot use a waterfall as a bed.
So we're assuming that it's something that extends horizontally.
And if the predicament of the poem is the inability to sleep, when I look at a poem, I always try to figure out what is problem is.
What is predicament?
What conflict?
What itch that poem into being in some way?
Where is the scar?
Exactly.
If the problem is to be a verse to sleep, the second line is those who are a verse to sleep, the problem is not being able to have an access that comes.
Or if the problem is some kind of vitality that's lost, why does she start by talking about the water?
And not talking about the predicament.
And to me, this is what I think of as some idea of selflessness.
And I mean that both in a moral and a non-moral sense.
This idea that in order to talk from the center of experience, you don't always talk from the center of the eye.
And something you just said made me remember something, which is the Dickinson is also famous for using a lot of the passive voice that thing that your freshman TA circles and says don't do this.
And later on, your poetry workshop leader tends to tell you, you know, that's not how you construct a good poem.
But to verb a noun is something that she does quite actually quite often.
And at the beginning of the show in your introduction, you talked about time and space and time being what enables things not to happen all at once.
And I think there's a pressure in this poem for that things are all happening at once.
Yeah.
That's unbelievable.
Short poem.
In undulating rooms, you know, recalls the water as an undulating medium.
And yet here, rather than being a place of rest, it's abhorrent is the rest in this undulating room.
Well, also there's a, I think there's an anxiety there about abhorrent is the rest in undulating rooms.
And undulating current is a, we know from, you know, math is, it just keeps going, right?
There's no, it's infinite.
And there's notion that there should be an end to things, right?
The thing should not continue forever, that to continue forever is the abyss.
Well, in fact, whose amplitude no end invades, exactly.
Yeah.
Well, I'll read one more poem and then you can choose one, but it's one that I keep returning to again, because I failed a comprehending.
But my failure to comprehend it doesn't detract at all on the contrary.
It makes us pull a more intense for me.
I reason, earth is short and anguish absolute and many hurt, but what of that?
I reason we could die.
The best vitality cannot excel decay, but what of that?
I reason that in heaven somehow it will be even some new equation given, but what of that?
So.
Well, those that you've got the undulating rooms, right?
Each of those stands as, stands, of course, being the word for room, you tell you the word for room.
But what of that, you know?
Like, that poem is like this undulating doubt, right?
Not that one's reason, you can reason your way into the center of those stands is, but at the end, you're still left with this question about what the meaning you've made of things actually means, right?
And that seems like a very common, in Dickinson, it's often true that the form seems to make a lot of sense.
So it's repetitive, or it's almost a awkwardness, repetitiveness.
There's a refrain, right?
The end of each of those stands is the same, but the content is of incredible disorder.
Yeah, and earlier you spoke about the resistance to explanation that you get.
And here, the reasoning process is something that usually is driven by a desire for explanation.
So she reasons Earth is short and anguish absolute.
This is a very Christian presupposition that we are on Earth.
Our pain and suffering on Earth as long as we are in body is something that gives us hurt,
heavenly hurt, to get many hurt.
But what of that?
This would be a, it's already almost like a Christian reasoning process.
What does it matter that we have to suffer here in a finite mode?
When we get to heaven, and all of this is going to have its just recompense, and it's all going to be redeemed.
But after in the third stands, I reckon that in heaven somehow it will be even some new equation given.
That's the Christian answer to the question, but what of that?
But the same question returns, but what of that?
Which means that any explanation that reason can provide for this bewildering condition is going to be either feckless or unsatisfying.
That's right, and I think this idea that there's a transaction at the heart of every relationship, right?
That there's a transaction at the heart of your relationship with God in the Christian idea of that.
And that the mind's impetus, what the mind wants to do is think outside of that.
It wants to recognize that, and then immediately it asks the second level question of,
"But what of that?"
I think that there's a syntactic, there's a linguistic barrenness about that line, but what of that, right?
There's a way in which it's endlessly weird and slightly ambivalent, and the mind kind of pulls back from the beautiful little equations it can recognize into this nether space.
Is there a poem that you would like to bring into the mix?
There is, and I'm trying to decide whether to talk about something that's more like that illustrates what we're talking about.
I want to read something that's, actually, is a very different kind of thing because of all this kind of rational recognition of what an idea of thinking about the world means.
There's another kind of Dickinson poem that's kind of wilder, and I want to read one of those.
And this one is called "Of Bronze and Blaze."
And it's a lot like, you talked about the cosmos and your introduction, and this one seemed like a good link with that.
And it's also a very kind of uncanny poem, but there is a scenario in it, and she's sending herself kind of out into the world.
And it's a sunset scene, and I'm just going to read it. It's number 319 in the Franklin edition.
"Of Bronze and Blaze the North Tonight," so adequate it forms, so pre-constructed with itself, so distant to alarms, and unconcerned so sovereign to universe or me infects my simple spirit with taints of majesty,
"Till I take Vaster attitudes and strut upon my stem, distaining men, and oxygen for arrogance of them."
"My splenders are menagerie, but their completely show will entertain the centuries when I am long ago an island in dishonored grass whom none but daisies know."
And so it's a kind of a fantasia of, and poets like to think about this, right?
Like, what is the quality of immortality? What does it mean to be immortal?
And what's so interesting about this is that, for Dickinson, it's not the regard of the world at all.
It's her ability to diffuse herself in some way into the world past to disdain men and oxygen.
And I love that too, because it's not just a disdain of the world of men, it's a disdain of the world of the elements, it's a disdain of the world of the body, and of bodily composition.
And it's the decomposed self that she celebrates in some way at the end, and we go back to the grave.
And as we go back to the grave, we also go back to this idea she's pushing up the daisies right now, but daisies know this is the world of the maggots and the insects.
And she leaves us that when she wants to talk about immortality, she doesn't just want to talk about spiritual immortality.
She wants to reflect upon what that means for the body, what that means for the lived body and the lived experience.
I have two questions for you, Katie. One is earlier you said that there's a certain kind of neurotic, modernist poetry, which
I presume to exercise total control or find the right word, and that she's not a neurotic poet.
I think that's right. Would you call her, would you define her in some other term, define this in impossibility in her case, but would you call her psychotic rather than neurotic in a poem like this?
Well, I do that only in the most complementary way, but one of the, I think a way of seeing this poem as being psychotic is when you refer to yourself as having a stem, right, without doubt with no explanation, with no need to explain why that metaphor fits, but merely with this incredibly direct way of going at that act of mind.
And that when she reflects upon the world of bronze and blaze, the North tonight, so adequate it forms, so pre-concerted with itself, right.
So the first thing she does is not try to describe the scene as being a corresponding to her mental state, but she tries to describe it in a arrangement outside,
her world in a arrangement that seems utterly determined outside herself and how she fits into that world. So that kind of, when I say psychotic, what I mean is a kind of brutal certainty, an absolute
of the only thing that she's doing is that she's not a human being, but she's not a human being, but she's not a human being.
flowers, insects, grass, and everything that grew in the soil, with the
sort of sentiment of disdain for the elements that you find in this poem.
What is it about a love of particulars, right?
There's a poem where she says to make a prairie, it takes one clover and a B and
and reverie, the reverie alone will do a few, you know, and it's to make up a world
out of particulars, like somebody like John Cage or somebody who then wants to
take apart that world of particulars. It can only be taken apart, note by note, or
thing by thing, right? So the honor one is doing to the act of mind in this
poem and the possibilities of the imagination needs to be done thing by thing,
and as all gardeners listening, we'll know gardening is an intensely particular
activity. And so when she sort of became more of a rakely, she moved her
gardening inside. She had a herbarium, a book of flowers that she had pressed,
that's now available in a really beautiful reproduction from Harvard University
Press. And when you look at that, you see someone who was interested not just in
cultivating plant life, but in cultivating attention, identification, and
particularity. This brings us to actually your book of poems in, and so far as
the title of that book is this one tree. So you're talking about the love of
particulars and dealing with things, thing by thing. So as we reach the end of
our one query, I have for you is your relationship to Emily Dickinson. And you and
I have spoken about the way in which, you know, some of our parents and
ancestors, we are, we could say, condemned to or vowed to by blood and genealogy.
Others we adopt, you know, kind of spirit of kinship or freedom, or else these
ancestors have a way of adopting us. And I'm curious about whether you consider Emily
Dickinson in some way a kind of an ancestor who adopted you or vice versa. And
it wants you address that issue, then I'll ask you about your your own poems.
I think that that's a that's very true. And I wonder, it seems to me quite arrogant
to say that she adopted me because she's Emily Dickinson and she's an orphan and
she doesn't choose. She she feels that she's been chosen against why would she
choose me. And yet I felt like I kept running into these strange signs that I was
supposed to work on her. So my undergraduate thesis advisor here, Al
Jelpie, brought his thesis on Emily Dickinson at Harvard. And I was halfway
into my thesis on Emily Dickinson at Harvard before I knew that was true.
And so I have one piece of evidence and my second piece of evidence was that
when I took my mother to Emily Dickinson's house, my mother was my mother's a
smoker and she smoked the whole time and she kept asking the tour guide
questions like was Emily Dickinson happy in high school? Did Emily Dickinson
have a boyfriend? Emily Dickinson ever have any fun. And I felt this sense of
tension between my mother figures, you know, about and that's when I knew
that days when I knew I felt like I'd taken Dickinson as my as my spiritual
mother in some way. And I never titled a poem until I wrote this book. And my
editor really was insistent that I needed titles and I understand why. But if I
ever had the chance to publish it again, I wonder what I do with that. I've
never liked titling ever ever ever ever ever before. I met Dickinson
after. So this raises the question of the title of your book of poems, this one
tree. And I promise that I'd ask you if there is an illusion to Aristotle by any
chance in that title. I don't know you tell me. Well, I when I read that title, I
thought it might be referring to Aristotle's rather famous concept of prime
matter famous in the history of philosophy because when he's trying to define
Uzi, what does substance mean in the most primary sense of the term substance?
So that's why they call it prote Uzi. He says substance, the most primary sense is
that which cannot be defined conceptualizer image because it's such a
particularity that you can only point to it and say this thing here, this object
there. So it can the only thing that's adequate to it is an indicative or so I
thought this tree here might mean I'm talking about the radical particular, the
primary substances as Aristotle understood. Well, that's that's a
that's a delicious interpretation of of it. I think that I was thinking of
Ashbury's book, some some trees, his famous book in Ashbury's kind of dreamy
generality about experience and in my book, I I was seeking a way to
particularize, you know, myself and the autobiographical again to try to find a
way in a world of contemporary poetry where people are really
looked to do that now and people like to write poems about video games and
stuff like that, right? Like I did I was I grew up in the suburbs in it on a
piece of land surrounded by fruit trees and I I had this sense that I needed to
find a way to write the autobiographical but it's interesting what you say about
pointing to because I actually taught a whole class on drama a couple years ago
that was based about on characters pointing at each other on stage and it's
always been something that's both fascinated and terrified me this idea of
pointing and I think when you read in my in my poetry I I too tend to use the
passive voice more than I care to admit and often what the passive voice does
it it wants to point that's that's what it's intention is so could you read us
something from your book to include the show? Sure that'd be great. I wrote this
poem when I was highly immersed in writing my thesis and there's a quality in it
that I find like Dickinson and it's called Song but again the title was
well after the poem was written so I was given more than I required goat cheese a
cranberry skirt more still that I did not want two days above the ocean a flat
rock on which to eat more still than that the unexpected scent of one
gardenia the zipper on my favorite sweater replaced saved wisdom teeth I was
given summer again and again given fall in the place it must have been made given
clover shadowy the yard that made me think the world was mine given two trees
given from their start Japanese maples one red and one green their leaves like
insects satellite branches and I was given branches which were sometimes cut
which grew again redirected themselves correctly up I was given the company of
friends the picture of a crucifixion tree well-ment I was given a new name but I
never used it sweet oh listen flocking around the frozen orange tree in some
crazy season never though it stained my previous years with who I had not
been I was given who I had not been and I received that absence like a light
like a visitation which was what it was that I could make a thing happen to me
well that's certainly a worthy poem of the Dickinsonian legacy Katie's thank
you for coming on we've been speaking with Katie Peterson here on KZSU for
entitled opinions and I want to wish you well and good luck at being a
Bunting fellow next year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in
Cambridge and next time you come back to your homeland if this is indeed your
MML Park homeland and we'll we'll get you back on terrific thanks for
it bye bye bye well here we are the is going the dust has only just begun to form
crops circles in the carpet singing feeling spin me round again and rub my eyes
this ground be burning when these streets mess with people what stopped to hold they're
Let's have it
hide and sing
Chains and solving my dreams. All the tears. They were here, through. Oh, the marks I'd be in.
There are walls where pleasure moments come before the take of a sweeping incense
to the end of this. Sing, all night. Hmmm, sing. Dreams and so in the street you catch me around
You know, time, time was. They were here first, what you say. Oh, that you only meant well, because you did what you say. That is our father,
but it's because it is. What you say. Oh, that is our one we need. You decided this. What you say.
No one dishes are And some love can't follow you such enough
Been fleeting, news people have gone 'Cause we're gonna love feeling now
But I'm believing that if you care with you, don't care bit
I don't know that you'll skip my own trip
Since we've done, knows people could have stopped
I don't know that you'll skip my own trip
You don't care if you don't care you can't follow you
You can't sit, you can't follow you
You can't sit, you can't look better
You can't look better
You can't look better, you can't look better
[BLANK_AUDIO]