Welcome! Please read some of my poetry while you’re here. Even if a post is two years old, they’re being read every day. They’re all current. Feel free to join the conversation. Lastly, treat this post as a Guest Book. Offer suggestions, improvements, requests or just say Hello! If you have a question concerning poetry or a poem, click read more at the end of this sentence and fill out the form. Continue reading Helen Vendler died on the 23rd of April and Marjorie Perloff March 24th. The poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch took this as an opportunity to write a eulogy for the Atlantic entitled “When Poetry Could Define a Life” (available here without a paywall). Reading the article elicited contradictory emotions. The first was regretting every snippy thing I’ve ever written about Helen Vendler. In Shakespeare In Love, Viola De Lesseps tells Shakespeare that she’s never heard him praise Marlowe before. Shakespeare answers: He wasn’t dead before. Have I mentioned that I have nothing but praise for Vendler? Anyway, I acknowledge that Kirsch was writing a eulogy and that there are certain rules attached to that, such as the assertion that no other, like the deceased, shall ever walk the Earth again. To wit:
…the loss of these towering scholars and critics feels like the definitive end of an era that has been slowly passing for years. In our more populist time, when poetry has won big new audiences by becoming more accessible and more engaged with issues of identity, Vendler and Perloff look like either remote elitists or the last champions of aesthetic complexity, depending on your point of view.
Not only is it the end of Vendler and Perloff, but the end of an entire era. Fine. I won’t begrudge them their epic-ending panegyrics. Seldom are we so richly praised as when we die. But this sort of sentiment always reminds me of the quip attributed to Charles de Gaulle: The graveyards are full of indispensable men. But anyway, what “era”? The era “when poetry could define a life“?
But that’s not what caught my attention. What did was Kirsch’s statement that readers are more engaged with poetry because of greater accessibility and issues of identity. But Kirsch’s “Becoming more accessible” could mean just about anything. A poem by Megan Fox is lexically “more accessible” than anything by John Ashbery, and while the poems of the bland and generic W.S. Merwin are numbingly accessible, they still aren’t as interpretatively accessible as instapoetry. As regards “issues of identity”, I’m just not seeing the evidence. Maybe on college campuses? But go to any Barnes & Noble (let alone any best sellers list) and the big new audience of the populist age is crying out for self-soothing and self-healing. Poets like Kaur, selling books in the millions, are cutting straight to the chase. Her latest book is a self-healing poetry workbook—literally a therapeutic instapoetry workbook. And if you went to that second link in the first paragraph above, (as of this writing) Microsoft Start offered a “related video” entitled “Author releases collections of poetry to support healing and personal growth (KRON San Francisco)”. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.
And it’s striking how similar the poems of the instapoets are to Taylor Swift’s lyrics (or the other way around). Swift’s lyrics could easily fit between the covers of any self-help, self-actuating, self-affirming book by an instapoet.
I'm lonely, but I'm good
I'm bitter, but I swear I'm fine
I'll save all my romanticism for my inner life and I'll get lost on purpose
This place made me feel worthless
Lucid dreams like electricity, the current flies through me and in my fantasies I rise above it
And way up there, I actually love it
Or
sweetheart
honey
babygirl
cutie
these are not my name
and I am not yours
but you use intimate words
to give yourself a false sense
of dominance over me
these are bullets you keep ready
for when you feel threatened
by my feminine energy
The first is by Swift and the second by Bridgett Devoue.
And then there’s Megan Fox’s recently released book, Pretty Boys are Poisonous. If I sampled one of her poems, you would be hard pressed to distinguish it from Swift or Devoue. It may seem random to mention Fox’s book, but we all know that no other contemporary book of poetry has remotely sold like celebrity Megan Fox’s. Let’s be honest, there’s a theme running through Swift’s lyrics, the poems of the instapoets, and Megan Fox’s poetry (and none of them are engaged with “issues of identity”). A Goodreads reviewer, reviewing Fox’s poetry, said it best: “this feels like a great therapeutic and cathartic experience for her to be able to finally speak her truth.”
In short, contemporary poetry has emphatically not won big new audiences by engaging with issues of identity but by engaging with issues of therapy and catharsis. Poetry books are literally turning into therapeutic regimens and the poems into therapeutants. Perhaps one can argue that therapy and catharsis entails “issues of identity” but I’ve read Kaur and the other instapoets (about 3 minutes per book) and dealing with identity, in the academic sense of the word, ain’t it.
Kirsch next contrasts Vendler and Perloff’s very different outlooks on poetry. For Vendler, “the best poets use all the resources of language—not just the meaning of words, but their sounds, rhythms, patterns, and etymological connections.” For Perloff, he writes, her preferred poetry is “drawn [from] the avant-garde tradition in modernist literature, which she described in her book Radical Artifice as ‘eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form.’” Vendler was the traditionalist while Perloff insisted, in Kirsch’s words, that poets “had a moral duty to resist [the bland co-option of words by television and advertising] by using language disruptively…”
This leads Kirsch to lament that the values of Vendler and Perloff, who felt that the study of “poetry was valuable in and of itself” have together given way to a “desperate” attempt at relevance by teaching —wait for it — wait for it— Taylor Swift.
Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendler’s own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.)
Consider that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 (and by “Literature” we mean poetry), and we see a pattern. Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, Swift’s lyrics are being taught in Literature Departments, and the New York Times puts out headlines that read, The Artists Dismantling the Barriers Between Rap and Poetry.
What’s the take away? Have the last twenty years been, effectively, a repudiation of twentieth century poetics and criticism? Maybe? Finally? (That would be delightful—to me. I’m of the burn it all down and build it anew school of art. I find the latter 20th century to be as stultifyingly formulaic as the worst of the latter 19th century—the former for its vapid transparency and the latter for its vacuous opacity.) It might be argued that Sylvia Plath anticipated the twenty-first century’s use of poetry as therapy. Her poetry was nothing if not a “great therapeutic and cathartic experience” for her readers (though perhaps not for her—in the end). There’s also Robert Lowell, but who reads Lowell anymore? But poetry as the purview of academia’s high priests—namely Vendler and Perloff—has been repudiated at the sales counter. The “big new audience” of our “populist” times (is there the sniff of contempt in Kirsch’s appellation?) don’t want poetry that needs a Vendler or Perloff to explain it to them (and not that I don’t myself enjoy reading Vendler). Whole decades of twentieth century poetry written to the academic(?) taste for studied obscurity—largely pointless and unrewarding—are being confined to special order status. Is that good? Is that bad? Is poetry being improved by the Megan Fox’s of the world? Maybe not. Yet the history of art is the history of the rare genius only emerging on the shoulders of those with an equal passion, if not ability, for their art.
Lastly, Kirsch writes that there are “no obvious heirs to Vendler and Perloff in American poetry today”. William Logan might have an opinion as regards that assertion, and is still alive as far as I know. Besides that, here I am and here I’ve been—for well over a decade—writing, reading, and discussing poetry. I, and others like me, who devote themselves to the discussion and exploration of poetry, are the heirs to Vendler and Perloff. Kirsch qualifies his assertion by writing: “it seems unlikely that we will see a similar conjunction of scholarly authority and critical discernment anytime soon”. But what does he mean by “scholarly authority”? If he means having the imprimatur of academics like Kirsch, then no. Of interest in this regard, a New York Times essay entitled, Has Academia ruined Literary Criticism? Which writes:
“Professionalization, he argues, secured intellectual autonomy for criticism’s practitioners. They could produce knowledge about literature in a manner intelligible chiefly to others producing the same kind of knowledge—a project that became both increasingly specialized and increasingly justified by political concerns, such as race, gender, equality, and the environment. “This is a world in which some of us can specialize in the study of cultural artifacts, and within this category to specialize in literary artifacts, and within literature to specialize in English, and within English to specialize in Romanticism, and within this period to specialize in ecocriticism of Romantic poetry,” Guillory writes. The cost of this professional autonomy is influence. “How far beyond the classroom, or beyond the professional society of the teachers and scholars, does this effort reach?” he asks, knowing that the answer is: not far at all.”
But if not that, then he’s welcome to contrast and compare anything I’ve written to Vendler or Perloff in terms of scholarship. If I’ve made a mistake, I’ll correct it. If he finds nothing to complain about, then may he be as amenable to correction. Which is to say, poetry still defines my life, thank you very much.
And that’s my opinion about that.
I go to you as goes the sand
Forgetful of the hour,
As carried by the wind’s left hand—
A fragmentary flower.
I go as from the hardened limb
For it was never ours—
To be swept beyond the Earthly rim
Into the bowl of stars.
May 8th 2024
by me, Patrick Gillespie
My silence for the last few days has been the result of a back injury, caused by an attempt to walk. Walking—I had no idea—is a high risk activity. Do it advisedly. For the past week, it’s been a test of endurance to sit, stand, walk, or recline. Being flat on my back, it seems, is about the only way to heal without pain. This hasn’t stopped me from working, little by little, on Wistthistle: Along the Way. (The second book of my fantasy quartet, or tetralogy). The poem above is the result. Éhto recites the poem when she sees the desert for the first time, struck with awe, and sorrowful that she can’t be a peaceful traveler when her world is at war.
If it reminds a little of Dickinson, that’s deliberate. As mentioned before, Éhto borrows from Dickinson in her musings. Also: I get poets under my skin by getting under theirs. Writing like other poets to absorb their craft is a part of my art. In the current book I’m reading on Dickinson by Robert Weisbuch, he calls Dickinson an analogical poet. (Weisbuch’s book at Amazon is absurdly expensive but reasonable from ABEBooks—which is also owned by Amazon, incidentally.) If I understand him correctly, his argument is that Dickinson often doesn’t center her poems on a given subject, but around analogies. That’s part of the reason we’re often left wondering what she’s referring to. My own speculation is that the subject matter mattered less to Dickinson less than the emotions they gave rise to; and that analogies were a way for Dickinson and evoke these emotions. So, to borrow some academese: Dickinson is engaged in a different sort of “centering”—that of the emotional or psychic self in an analogical world (a world understood through analogy), rather than that of the physical self centered in an identifiable location or centered in a traditionally understood topic. An example, used by Weisbuch, is Dickinson’s famous poem, My Life had stood — a loaded gun. Each quatrain is a different analogy describing, in a sense, her emotional response to—what?—an affair?—her own poetry?—a set of beliefs? In a fascinating analysis, Weisbuch calls the poem a sort of refutation (counter to any other interpretation I’ve read). He writes: “An attitude which is portrayed elsewhere as an ennobling and self-fulfilling fidelity to an inspiring ideal here appears as a debasing servility [a destructive gun with no life of its own], a retreat from the integrity of struggle and doubt.” What’s important to Dickinson is the poetry of her emotional response (which can be applied to a great many experiences in life). Likewise, in her poem You cannot put a fire out, Dickinson never tells us what the “Flood” is that she cannot fold into a drawer. That’s not the point.
So…
In writing the poem above, my aim was to write something like an analogical poem.
“When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.”
“Death—so—the Hyphen of the Sea—” 1454
Do People moulder equally,
They bury, in the Grave?
I do believe a species
As positively live
As I, who testify it
Deny that I—am dead—
And fill my Lungs, for Witness—
From Tanks—above my Head—
I say to you, said Jesus—
That there be standing here—
A Sort, that shall not taste of Death—
If Jesus was sincere—
I need no further Argue—
That statement of the Lord
Is not a controvertible—
He told me, Death was dead—
FR391/J432
I included the quotes above because the first is Dickinson stating that she adopts personas in her poetry. The word “persona” was first used in the 17th century, but may or may not have been one Dickinson was familiar with. The second because Dickinson, in many, many of her poems, treats the sea as a kind of burial ground in and of itself. A great article at the Dickinson Electronic Archives examines just this propensity later in her career, writing:
Dickinson began writing poems that referred to the sea, and particularly to the experience or threat of drowning, with increasing frequency.
One of the poems, given as an example, begins: “Drowning is not so pitiful/As the attempt to rise.” Yothers, the author of the article, cites another poem, writing that “this capacity of the sea to engulf the human body and brain appears in another poem from 1863, Fr. 631A (MS H 90). The poem includes the lines: ““The River reaches to my Mouth – / Remember – when the Sea / Swept by my searching eyes – the last – / Themselves were quick – with Thee!”
The point is that like the earth’s surface, the sea’s surface is another division—a metaphorical and symbolic boundary—between living (above) and death (below). But undermining this nice metaphor is the diving bell and the diving suit, which Dickinson—given her love and knowledge of science and her frequent references to sailing and the sea—would certainly have been aware of. She took it as an opportunity to wryly undermine Christian theology. She starts by asking if people moulder differently:
Do People moulder equally,
They bury, in the Grave?
I do believe a species
As positively live
The initial question mischievously undermines the temptation to read this poem in the manner that some readers do. To wit, the question she asks isn’t: Do some live and some die in the Grave? No. Implicit in the question is that everyone moulders. Period. Do they moulder/rot unequally? Maybe. Possibly. But who cares? They’re dead. They’re mouldering. So there’s that. But then she goes on to say that there’s a “species” who live, but we won’t find them in the Grave, because she’s already eliminated that possibility through her mischievous rhetorical question. A “species” does live.
As I, who testify it
Deny that I—am dead—
And fill my Lungs, for Witness—
From Tanks—above my Head—
The temptation, including my own, is to treat a passage like this (as in so many of her poems) figuratively—as metaphor or metonymy. For example, does she really mean lungs? What does she mean by Tanks? What does she really mean by above my Head? And yet the quatrain is written with a straightforwardness that clearly describes a diving bell or suit. I see two possibilities. If one wants to read this figuratively, which is possible given Dickinson’s poetics, then the Lungs could be her poetry. Spoken poetry, after all, requires that the lungs be filled. The Tanks could be inspiration or even divine inspiration.
In short, Dickinson could be stating that she lives on in her poetry (a hoary old conceit, just ask Spenser and Shakespeare). Her poetry “testifies” to the denial of death. She writes, “[I] fill my lungs—[behold! or “for Witness” or look at the Tanks]—from Tanks—above my Head—” The Tanks could also mean you, the reader, though this strikes me as pushing the conceit to its limits and beyond. That said, we are, literally, above her Head (Dickinson, being buried). The second way to read this quatrain is to treat Dickinson as assuming a persona (that of the diver) and that she is straightforwardly describing a diving bell or suit. She is speaking to us as a diver who, in the next two quatrains, will use their living burial to troll scripture.
I say to you, said Jesus—
That there be standing here—
A Sort, that shall not taste of Death—
If Jesus was sincere—
Except that’s not quite what Jesus said. According to the King James translators, he said: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” She could have written: “Some be that shall not taste of Death…” That would have kept the meter. Instead, one can read—”A Sort“—as Dickinson’s sly riposte. Remember that the poem’s opening lines flatly deny that there’s anything other than mouldering in the Grave. Option A is mouldering. Option B is mouldering. There is “a “buried Sort”, however, who don’t moulder. And they are buried at Sea. Viola!
I need no further Argue—
That statement of the Lord
Is not a controvertible—
He told me, Death was dead—
Dickinson no longer needs to Argue with the true believers. She’s persuaded. Behold! For Witness! The statement of the Lord truly is incontrovertible. Here I stand, in my diving bell, buried and living where centuries and centuries of men lie dead and mouldering.
For witness what science and engineering have wrought!
The entirety of the poem, read this way, is Dickinson trolling Christian faith. You can almost see her in her diving suit, shrugging: See? Just like he said: Death is dead! The joke is that it isn’t faith but science and engineering that have defeated death, utterly undermining the scripture’s intent. On these terms, in other words, Dickinson will accept Jesus’s words as incontrovertible—but not on faith. (I do think there’s a lot of laughter in Dickinson’s poetry, and possibly more so than any of her 19th century peers.)
Nonetheless, one can also read the conceit as metaphor—ourselves as the “tanks” that give air and lungs to her poetry. But read this way, the deadpan “He told me, Death was dead—” loses its punch and humor. If Dickinson is declaring that she will live on in her poetry, then one wants to read the last line earnestly and devoutly. I have a hard time reading it that way (and the conceit would strike me as uncharacteristically ham-handed). Its colloquial directness suggests a dead-pan delivery. My instinct is to read Dickinson as assuming a persona (as she told Higginson she was wont to do) in order to impishly troll Christian doctrine (“I do not respect doctrines,” she once wrote a Mrs. Joseph Haven to explain her non-attendance at a church service [p. 8 Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, Weisbuch].) It’s as if someone said to her: If you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior then there will be no afterlife for you. To which she said: Hold my beer.
“You can’t put a fire out,” she said so quietly that only Ímah could hear her, and she exhaled. “You can’t. A fire goes and goes, Ímah, and we endlessly give to fire the things that ignite and burn the world. You can’t fold a flood in your pocket, but the wind finds it out, tells the cedar and fells the cedar in wind and water.”
You cannot put a Fire out—
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan—
Upon the slowest night—
You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor—
[J530/FR583]
The opening paragraph above is from WistThistle: Along the Way, the second book in The Isles Quartet. In the first book and in the second book, the main character, Éhto, draws her words from a number of Dickinson’s poems, some less obviously than others. This is a different universe, where there is no Emily Dickinson, but I thought it would be fun to collaborate with her a little. I also thought I would examine the poem.
The first thing I would note are the parallels between this poem and Robert Frost’s later poem, Fire and Ice:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Frost probably was not thinking of or inspired by Dickinson, but there is a similarity between the two. Dickinson contrasts fire and water, Frost contrasts fire and ice. There is the sense in Dickinson’s poem, that the fire and the water threaten to consume some aspect of her world. Frost makes the assertion directly.
You cannot put a Fire out—
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan—
Upon the slowest night—
[I originally tried writing text over an image—a newer feature of WordPress—but it was a complete disaster (because—Wordpress). So back to text.]
Anyway, as with so many of Dickinson’s poems, we’re given the choice to read her words literally, figuratively and/or as metonymy. For example, is she literally describing Fire and Flood, or are these figuratively referring to something else? Gossip? Grief? Jealousy? Longing? The list could go on and, frankly, any one of these might make sense of the poem. That we can read the poem in so many ways contributes to the poem’s universality. Nonetheless, some of us like to guess at what Dickinson might have actually had in mind. Interestingly, in one version of the poem she wrote “No Man can put a Fire out—”
Unlike the current day, Dickinson was seemingly untroubled by the use of “man” to refer to both men and women, and according to Dickinson scholars sometimes refers to herself (as a poet) using the masculine pronoun. I write seemingly because, according to my reading so far, there’s no record of her having bridled at the use of “Man” to signify humankind. It would probably be anachronistic to think that she would. So why did she settle on “You” rather than “Man”? I don’t really have a good theory except to nevertheless assert that “You” is more universalizing than “Man”. More revealingly, I think, her impulse to use “Man” suggests that she wasn’t addressing someone specific, but that she was using “You” the same way we do—as a sort of universal you that includes ourselves without having to specifically say “I” (which she could have).
So, what is she talking about? If it’s not literally “a fire”, then it’s something like fire. Something that’s troubling her, that won’t let her be, that doesn’t need a fan or a bellows (in the sense of fanning the flames) to keep it going, but that ignites the flammable mind even on the calmest or “slowest night”. She can’t quit thinking about it. One thought leads obsessively to the next like the leaping of a flame. In short, Emily is tossing and turning. Despite the slow night, her thoughts are a conflagration that feeds what it consumes.
You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor—
In the second stanza she gives us a clue as to what it might be that’s driving her to madness—something that she can put in a Drawer, and that could be a letter or even a poem. If it’s a letter, then perhaps someone has written her something that she can’t set aside, and that sends us back to speculation. Is it gossip, grief, jealousy, longing?—some news or revelation as regards a relationship? Maybe because I’m a poet, and because I know that she’s written poems that seem similar to this—They shut me up in Prose—(specifically about her urge to express herself) I like to think that this poem is a further expression of her need, if not compulsion, to write. She might as well try to “fold a Flood”—referring to the flood of inspiration that drives her poetry. In other words, she could no more silence (fold away) her urge to write, putting it in a Drawer, than “you” could fold away floodwaters. The Winds (the daily knocks of living and life) would find and drive out what is hidden in that drawer. The flood must have its outlet or it will tell (or spill) on the Cedar Floor.
And what does she mean by Cedar Floor? This is very likely a metonymy for the home. In a sense, the floor is your house and your home. Go beyond the floor and you go outside. So, in that sense, if the flame of Dickinson’s relentless thought isn’t given the outlet of poetry (if she’s forced to fold and hide it in a drawer) then these thoughts and emotions will flood her home life. “You” cannot put away the flood (the sheer drama of living) in a drawer and not expect the dam (or something) to break. The “Winds”, life’s vicissitudes, will fill the dam and cause it to rupture (to flood the home) without the outlet of self-expression/poetry.
By “tell your Cedar Floor” she may mean that what remains secretive within the poem will be made stridently “public”—or family knowledge. The flame must speak, if not in poetry then by “telling” its troubles (if that’s what they are) aloud. One can read an implicit warning in the poem: Either let me write my poetry or my need to express my internal emotional state will flood the home—will be made external. It will tell itself to the Cedar Floor in all our rooms. Why cedar? Cedar can be used for flooring but was unlikely flooring in Dickinson’s Amherst. The reference is likely Biblical in origin. Cedar was considered a beautiful and fragrant wood. In that light, what Dickinson may be suggesting (with perhaps an acid tongue) is that the flood of her emotional life, without the outlet of poetry, will disrupt that beauty and fragrance (home life’s equanimity). Allow the wrong wind to move her on a given day and Dickinson will damned well tell your precious cedar equanimity a thing or two, and see how that goes. Wouldn’t you rather I write a poem? I read anger and an implicit threat in the second stanza—and also in the first.
It’s as if someone had said to her—why don’t you put aside your poem and make us some lovely and fragrant pudding? The duties of home life and womanhood will make you forget all this literary fussing of yours. Trust us. To which she dismissively and angrily says: “You cannot put a Fire out….”
But, as I wrote earlier, you can also read this poem as her reaction to a letter she has received and that she can’t stop thinking about. Folding it and putting it away won’t help. The contents threaten to disrupt home and house, her equanimity, but the poem ends without a solution. The poet is beside herself.
I’m thirty percent done with the second book of the Isles Quartet, my four book fantasy series. For those new to the blog, this is the fantasy books I talked myself into writing when I was trying to talk my daughter into writing a fantasy novel/series. My intention is to finish Along the Way this summer, then begin the third novel this fall. I also hope to write some poetry while I’m at it.
I continue to send the first book of the fantasy quartet to agents and it continues to be rejected, whether for the quality of my novel, my queries or both is hard to say. I did spend some time researching the writing of the perfect query letter and tried my hand at writing the perfect query letter. That got me nowhere. At this point, if someone were to tell me that I will never get an agent because my queries are terrible, I would believe them. I’ve quit trying. My query letters, nowadays, amount to: Hi. Hope all is well. Weather’s great. Here’s my book. Read it.
I do want to mention that my first novel—a novel that takes place in Vermont with elements of magical realism (depending on your point of view) and poetry—was published by the wonderful, independent publisher Tara Caribou of Raw Earth Ink. I have a great Raw Earth sticker that Tara sent me, but I still haven’t decided where to put it because I like it so much. Truly. Tara has been wonderfully supportive of me and my writing, so I don’t get to complain too much. She essentially designed the book cover, and I love it.
You can find this book and many other books at her website, including three collections of her own poetry Fallen Star Rising, four, Euphoria in Blue and the collection Sketches: Fables, Allegories, and Parables. You can also find samples of her writing there. As of writing this post, I’ve ordered all four books from Lulu.
I’ve also been reading the Elemental Logic fantasy novels by Laurie J Marks. I want to write a post on the first of those novels before long. In the meantime, I’m open to analyzing another poem of Emily Dickinson’s. If you have a request, mention it in the comment section. (My last several analyses of Dickinson have been requests.) Other than that, I hope all is well and the weather is great. Read my book.
& From the back cover of Tiny House, Big Mountain
With her ex-husband imprisoned for embezzlement, the pampered Virginia Fleetman relocates to an inherited mountainside property expecting to live in a newly-finished vacation home. Instead she finds a half-finished foundation with the builder Drew Tippet and her twelve-year-old daughter Cody living inside. Drew has been planning a new life too, but after the checks stopped coming, she is forced to make the basement a refuge.
When Virginia orders Drew and her daughter out, a cascade of life-altering events inextricably binds them together. Cody’s visions and premonitions, after nearly drowning, make her wonder if anyone, including her own mother, believes her. Drew, with a broken back and ankle–and a worsening dependence on pain medication–struggles to forgive herself. Above all, if they’re to have a home before winter, all three must work together to build a house atop the foundation.
Tiny House, Big Mountain is a coming-of-age novel set in the fictional town of Brookway, Vermont where magical realism is woven with betrayal, addiction, and recovery through the bonds of friendship, family, and community.
This is something I wrote this morning—a tale within the tale of my second book: WistThistle: Along the Way. A little background: Éhto is the main character throughout the four books of WistThistle, like Ged in Earthsea. Duni doesn’t speak the language of Éhto, but Éhto speaks Duni’s language and is translating Duni’s story for Ímah, the brother of her husband. Duni, who is in love with Ímah, is trying to explain to Ímah, in her way, why she has made the choices she made. Part of the novel’s world building is the language itself, hence the tone of the story’s language.
Duni began with a sing-song voice, saying. “Iy’ta èþé ürio!” which meant, Speak, will I, of the raven!
Then Éhto translated. “And Raven did not always fly; and Raven was not always hoarse of voice, and Raven was not always black of eye. Raven was a beautiful woman—fair and lithesome. And it was for her beauty that men came to seize her, to possess her, to say of her that she was theirs and obeyed no other.
“Ezū’ta èþé Bodfyil!” said Duni, as though she sang, which meant, Speak, will I, of the sorcerer!
And Éhto said, “And the sorcerer, who also was a King, possessed a cape that was of black feathers. And when the cape was worn by the Sorcerer King, then did the cape become great wings that carried him to Raven. Though she did not desire him, he took her against her will. Then did she swear that she would never obey him, but would take his cape and fly away. The cape belongs to me, he answered, and should you ever wear it, then it shall tear you limb from limb. But Raven said, if I am made to obey you, then shall my heart be torn limb from limb, and so in defiance of the Sorcerer King, she put on the cape and the cape tore her limb from limb until she was only the black wings, the black beak, and the black claws of the cape. She and the cape were made one being. Then did Raven fly from the Sorcerer King, and she said, My choice! My choice and no others! But Raven still possessed her voice, and it was the most beautiful voice in all the world.”
“Éloa’ta èþé Najati!” said Duni, as though she sang, which meant, Sing, will I, of the enchantress!
And Éhto said, “The Enchantress heard of a black bird. The bird’s voice was more beautiful than any other’s. And so that she might command Raven’s voice, the Enchantress went into the forest to capture her. With a magical art that was like the gray mists of morning, she took Raven in the net of her spells. Then did Raven swear that she would never sing for her, but would escape the cage and fly away. The Enchantress said to Raven: Though you may escape the cage, your voice cannot. But Raven said, if I am made to obey you, then shall my heart also be caged, and so one day Raven flew from her cage and left behind her voice. Then when she spoke, her noise was a hoarse caw, and yet her voice, still within the cage, spoke aloud, saying, My choice! My choice and no others!”
“Uéi otoza’ta séða!” said Duni, almost in song, for with her speech she kept rhythm with a hand on her flank, which meant, Here me, I speak of Death.
And Éhto said, “All living things know and fear death—all but Raven! When death came, Raven was unafraid. The moth hid among the thorns. The skoko burrowed into the earth. The mother fled with her child. The harvestman abandoned his field, but Raven did not fly away. Raven waited even as the winds turned black the leaves, and swept them away. Then Death stood beneath Raven, holding before him the cage made by the Enchantress, for he had long ago claimed the Enchantress, saying: Hear me, Raven, I come now to carry you away. And Raven answered: If I obey, O Death, my spirit shall be caged forevermore. And then—for Raven felt Death’s chill upon her—she flew into into the hollow of death’s left eye, to see what was to see within death’s skull; and there she saw an infinity of great beauty—the stars, sun and moon of our and every world— for all that we see and know is conceived of and known by Death. Raven was greatly moved, but she would not let her spirit be trapped in Death’s cage. She took out her eyes, hiding one by the emptiness of Death’s left eye and the other by Death’s right eye. By this means was her spirit able to find her way back to life. By this means, through Raven’s eyes, do we all, for when Death calls, our spirits fly into Death’s left eye and return anew—remade and reborn—through Death’s right eye. And thus it was that Raven flew out of Death’s right eye and returned to the limb of the tree—reborn and with eyes as black as Death. My choice! she cried. My choice and no others! Death bowed and put aside the cage. And so it is that Raven alone, having traded her eyes for Death’s, remembers the many lives that she and all of us have lived. That is Raven’s wisdom.”
I’m now reading Rebecca Patterson’s book “Emily Dickinson’s Imagery” (published posthumously). Patterson was the first Dickinson scholar (if I’m reading the preface correctly) who, in 1951, posited Dickinson’s lesbian attachments, which was greeted just as you would expect—with shock and rejection by some and revelatory acceptance by others. As Margaret Freeman writes: “[Patterson’s] hypothesis that Emily’s ‘lover’ was female rested on just as much evidence (or lack of it) as other, ‘more acceptable’ theories that have variously identified Charles Wadsworth, George Gould, Edward Hunt, or Samuel Bowles as the (male) object of the poet’s affections…”
But it wasn’t this passage that I wanted to share, but one of the longest endnotes in the book (the best thing in the book so far, and it’s a good book if you like this sort of thing). I found it so engaging that I thought I’d share it in all its glory:
Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (1848), p. 106. The name of this pioneer feminist was introduced, apparently by Emily Dickinson herself, at the first of her two meetings with T.W. Higginson. The poet even essayed a little feminist joke, which wholly escaped her visitor. Higginson reported with solemn bafflement that after mentioning her domestic duties she added, “‘& people must have puddings’ this very dreamily, as if they were comets—and so she makes them” (L342a). Such a redoubtable feminist should have remembered Sarah Grimké’s scornful attack on the male dictum that “She that knoweth how to compound a pudding is more desirable than she who skillfully compounds a poem” (The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, 1838). Grimké must have gotten her pudding and her title from “The Equality of the Sexes” by “Constantia” (Judith Sargent Murray), who demanded (Massachusetts Magazine March-April 1790) whether it was “reasonable that a candidate for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent being, who is to spend at eternity in contemplating the works of the Deity, should at present be so degraded as to be allowed no other ideas, than those which are suggested by the mechanism of the pudding?” Royal Tyler’s Van Rough approved the general opinion “that if a woman knew how to make a pudding, and to keep herself out of fire and water, she knew enough for a wife,” (The Contrast, act 1, scene 2, a play almost certainly known to Emily Dickinson). Of course it all went back to Samuel Johnson, who saw the necessity of asserting that “My old friend, Mrs. Carter, could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus.” Best known to Emily was Charlotte Brontë’s famous diatribe against those “more privileged fellow-creatures” who thought women should “confine themselves to making puddings” and the like trivial occupations (Jane Eyre), although she could not have read Elizabeth Barett’s attack on the “pudding-making and sock-darning theory” of women’s activities noticed earlier. There was something about making puddings that set a feminist’s teeth on edge, and Emily expected Higginson to know it.
Can you just imagine Emily reading that sarcastic little dictum that “She that knoweth how to compound a pudding is more desirable than she who skillfully compounds a poem”!
Of course, if we treat “pudding” metonymically (which Dickinson probably was), then it can mean all sorts of trivial things. (Her barb was directed at people, after all, not just men.) People must eat—granted; but a pudding is not that. A pudding is what we gobble down whilst gossiping over that little tramp, Miss Littleslip, who dared to show her ankles during Reverend Snipple’s catechism. “If you must write your little poems, Emily, then why not go to your room? Or you could make yourself useful? Why don’t you bring us a little pudding.”
It’s going to be my new motto.
“& people must have their puddings.“
The Color of the Grave is Green—
The Outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Field—
Except it own a Stone—
To help the fond—to find it—
Too infinite asleep
To stop and tell them where it is—
But just a Daisy—deep—
The Color of the Grave is white—
The outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Drifts—
In Winter—till the Sun—
Has furrowed out the Aisles—
Then—higher than the Land
The little Dwelling Houses rise
Where each—has left a friend—
The Color of the Grave within—
The Duplicate—I mean—
Not all the snows c'd make it white—
Not all the Summers—Green—
You've seen the Color—maybe—
Upon a Bonnet bound—
When that you met it with before—
The Ferret—Cannot find—
[FR424/J411]
This is actually one of Dickinson’s more straightforward poems, and another request. The mystery is less in trying to sort out “nonrecoverable deletions”—missing grammar that makes allusions a guessing game—than the more normal game of interpreting imagery (in this case colors). The one real curve ball in the poem is in sussing out the meaning of Duplicate, but we’ll get to that. The poem is six stanzas that can be divided neatly into thirds, each third reflecting on a color of the grave.
The Color of the Grave is Green—
The Outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Field—
Except it own a Stone—
To help the fond—to find it—
Too infinite asleep
To stop and tell them where it is—
But just a Daisy—deep—
Dickinson establishes the poem’s stake, as she often does, in the first line. Color will be the nexus round which the poem’s meaning is adjudicated. The color of the grave is green, she says, and she will devote the next seven lines giving us context for that color. It is the color of the field, presumably—the grass, the flower’s leaf, and perhaps the limb of a weeping willow. Green is the color of life. We might be inclined to forget the dead. Being green ourselves, in a sense—being alive— our understanding of death can only be of the “outer grave” and will be colored/covered by that. If not for the stone, you would not know the burial plot (or the dead) from the field. They otherwise vanish both figuratively and literally. Green is the color of spring and vigor and, in that sense, we’re not meant to be thinking of the dead. The fact of our aliveness separates us truly comprehending death. The youthful/vibrant color of green, of life and growth, is a barrier. Only the outer grave is knowable or discoverable, and that is only discoverable—by the fond—because of the Stone. The dead are too infinite asleep to be guides. In that regard, the only thing that tells where the dead is, is the daisy—alive and whose roots go deep. The suggestion, perhaps, is that the daisy’s realm is both in life and death. The daisy alone comprehends both life and death, being half above the burial ground and half among the dead—and so can tell where the dead lie. As for ourselves, what we comprehend of the daisy is the green of its stem and leaves, and the flower itself (fed by death).
The Color of the Grave is white—
The outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Drifts—
In Winter—till the Sun—
Has furrowed out the Aisles—
Then—higher than the Land
The little Dwelling Houses rise
Where each—has left a friend—
The next two stanzas move us from green to white, from youth to age, when the skin becomes pale and the hair gray. Now we return to graveyard in old age. As in us, so in the world. Youth and growth—green—is forever behind us. The color of the grave is white, the color of the marble stone and of bones. We begin to know it from the field. We are no longer greenly oblivious to the grave. The sun, which had been our ally in youth, a symbol of warmth, life and regeneration, becomes the teller (rather than the stone and daisy), telling us ‘where it is‘, where death lies. The sun ‘furrows the the Aisles‘, showing us the path from which cannot escape, the aisle that leads us to our own death and subsidence. We are shown the piles of dirt marking where the newly dead are buried. In each is “left a friend” in their little “Dwelling Houses”. They are “Friends” because they were of our own generation and have become the changeless generation of the dead. The piles of dirt will melt into the coffins as the coffin itself breaks and dissolves along with our bodies—all of it subsiding like the melting snow. White is the color of snow, of the grave stone, of the bones, of the life’s melting and dissolution.
The Color of the Grave within—
The Duplicate—I mean—
Not all the snows c'd make it white—
Not all the Summers—Green—
You've seen the Color—maybe—
Upon a Bonnet bound—
When that you met it with before—
The Ferret—Cannot find—
The final stanza takes us into the dwelling houses. Dickinson doesn’t say the color of the grave is black. She calls the color “The Duplicate”. She says that we’ve maybe seen the color “upon a Bonnet bound”, such as a mourner might wear, but this is only a duplicate of the color within the grave—the color of the bonnet is in no way as final as that terrifying absolute of the grave. The living may wear the color, but the color remains a mere facsimile/duplicate. The color is unnameable. And that is the truly terrifying twist in this poem. And the genius of the poem. She cannot name it. By it’s very nature, the color has no name. To even have a name places it within our world. The color she describes is the color of absence—an absence that is no color, so unconditional in its nameless annihilation that it can only be like a color that you’ve seen elsewhere. The color even annihilates its own name. And not all the summers, now, past or future, can undo that annihilation. Not all the snows, not all the symbolism we attach to white—not the shroud, the white of the sun, poetry, the robe of Christ or the white pages of religion’s rhetoric (in other poems she has referred to her poetry as “snow”)—can undo that color, that abnegation of being, that denial and complete negation of the the world itself. Maybe you’ve seen it, she writes. That you’ve seen the color on the bonnet, in other words, is no guarantee that you’ve actually understood or comprehended that last and final “Color of the Grave”. Maybe. If you’ve understood her poem—then maybe “you’ve met with it before”. And yet, can you really? No matter how deep the ferret digs—she writes as though changing her mind—you will never find the color she’s describing. If you find it, if you think you’ve dug deeply enough, then you haven’t found it. What the ferret, or you, could find will never be the color she’s describing. This is no ride in a carriage with death personified. To see this color is to be annihilated. You may comprehend this color in a mourner’s bonnet but, to truly see this color, is to be dead.
up in Vermont | March 4 2024
I know those strains you’re whistling now
You hear the music too—
Seductive little madrigals—
O yes, I’m sure you do.
You talk to me about the starlings
I say it’s chickadees.
Let’s both of us debate the birds
And never mind the bees—
The bee that flies melodiously
To kiss the neighbor’s flower;
The neighbor’s hummingbird that sips
The nectar from the bower.
We both of us know that refrain.
Our better angels wring
Their hands all while we hum the tunes
Those other angels sing.
I know those strains
by me, Patrick Gillespie April Fools 2024
Margo Olaffson represents a new type of pre-agency, Agent², that promises to help authors target agents. While agents submit an author’s book manuscript to publishers, pre-agents use their in-depth knowledge of agents (and their agencies) to submit to them query letters. Where the agent represents the author’s manuscript, the pre-agent represents the author’s query letter. The pre-agent will also assist in any contract negotiations with agents. Their goal is to bring a new level of representation to authors.
What do you do that’s different from what an agent does?
Well, first of all, we don’t represent novels. We represent queries. Now that agents are joining publishers in only accepting solicited queries, authors are going to need us—pre-agents—to submit queries to agents. Our job is to get you the agent who will get you the publisher who will buy you the bestseller placement your book deserves. And to get there, it all starts with the perfect query. You can pay for query writing workshops and seminars and there are many of them, or you can work with Agent², enjoying a lifelong partnership submitting queries to agents.
And what about comparables or comp titles?
Comparables are as important as queries. They’re a part of your elevator pitch and they have to be perfect. As agents will tell you: The comp must be perfect, no comp is better than a poor comp. Comps are a shorthand that tells the agent where your book belongs on the shelf.
Don’t genre and last name dictate where books go on the shelves?
Think of it as the shelf in the reader’s mind—their “favorite books” bookshelf. You want your book to be just like the books that are already there. That tells both agents and publishers that you know what your job is.
Shouldn’t an agent base their decision on the author’s manuscript?
There is a reason we represent queries, not manuscripts; and why we’re convinced that authors need Agent². Think of yourself as a salesman. The query is you, your business card and your foot in the door. Your novel is a vacuum cleaner. Do you know that authors spend thousands of dollars every year attending courses and seminars on queries? Do you know that some authors spend two months just researching comp titles? Maybe they could have written a collection of stories, a play, a new book of poetry, or even another novel. They could have, but we believe that’s not the best way to prioritize an author’s time and talent. Just think what you—the author—could accomplish by writing the perfect query. We think you should be writing queries because ultimately, you’re not selling your vacuum cleaner, you’re selling yourself. Your agent and publisher are a part of your team; and if you’re not thinking of their success, then you’re not think of the team’s success.
Your agency represents queries, but do you have advice as regards novels?
Look, before beginning a novel, every author should be asking themselves: What novel do I want my novel to be like? What novel am I going to compare my novel to? Readers are looking for the next book that’s just like the one they’ve read. The author’s responsibility is to demonstrate their knowledge of that market. No agent or publisher wants a book that readers haven’t read before. As part of your relationship with us, we will help you identify who you are writing like, what characters, plots and themes you have borrowed and which books, in general, you have imitated. If we can’t find those elements in your writing, then that’s a problem area we can address. Just as we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, we can’t let originality be the enemy of the marketable.
But what if the author is writing an original book?
As I say, this is just one of many obstacles our partners will work with you to overcome. Look, when you go to the bookstore, on what shelf does Barnes & Noble shelve the “original book” genre? Where do you shelve originality? It’s simple: If nobody has read your book before, who is going to read it again? But really, there’s no such thing as originality. Or let me put it this way, there’s nothing wrong with being original so long as your book is recognizably like other original books in the same genre and on the same shelf. It’s our motto: We don’t believe in originality; we believe in success.™
Why is your company named Agent²?
We multiply the power of an agent by two.
I notice a lot of agents and publishers are very interested in knowing whether an author already has an online presence and following.
Publishers are a business. We might be selling a vacuum, but we cultivate the salesman. The most successful authors come to publishers pre-monetized. These are authors who come, for example, with an established online presence and audience. If you are that author, then with your audience, our pre-agent 15% cut, the agent’s 15% cut, and the publisher’s 88% cut, the sky’s the limit. We are ready to partner with you.
So, it sounds like the most desirable authors are those who don’t need you?
Every agent wants the author who will be the perfect fit. If you can sell yourself, if you can represent yourself, if you can market yourself and successfully publish yourself, then, for us, our success is your success.
So can you explain what services your agency provides authors?
Absolutely. Thank you for asking. We have comprehensively researched agents, what authors they’re working with, what genres they prefer and, most importantly, the kinds of queries they have accepted. Query us with the first 30 words of your query, a synopsis of your query, and query-comparables. Knowing what queries your queries compare to is part of your elevator pitch and helps us readily identify which agent’s bookshelf we should be targeting. It has to be perfect. No pre-comp is better than a poor pre-comp. For that reason we strongly suggest you consider one of our seminars in pre-query queries—$79.99 for a ten day course, all inclusive. This will include group question and answer sessions along with one on one coaching. Our partners will clarify, according to our research, what fonts you should use, what kerning, line spacing and margin widths. The deluxe package will break down recommendations on a per agent basis. Remember, if you don’t know what your agent prefers in their query—teak floors or Persian carpets, displays of rare books or Chardonnay, the sauna or the hot tub, Venetian blinds or French drapes—you’re never going to sell them your vacuum cleaner. Once we’ve agreed to represent your query, we will research what comparables your comparables are comparable to, resolve problem areas, and submit your bespoke queries to targeted agents deemed to be the best fit. Lastly, we will help you to negotiate any contract with the agent of your choice. We represent you.
Is there anything else you want to add?
Yes, thank you. Not only do I think that you, Patrick, would benefit from our services, but we would love to offer you a discount on an upcoming seminar. As part of this interview, you were kind enough to share with us your own queries. Based on what we’ve read, we are confident that we can triumphantly turn around your record of unremitting failure. We’ve identified numerous shortcomings in your queries, would love to discuss them with you and potentially represent your queries. Regardless of your novels, we think your queries deserve a chance. Every author deserves a pre-agent to find the right agent.
up in Vermont | April 1 2024
PoemShape 