A note from Annie Finch:

 

Dear Ron,

 

In your great blog this week there is one point on which I must comment. I couldn't agree more that "platform independent" poetry seems to survive longest — and that Dickinson's poetry falls further inside than outside of that noncategorizing category.

 

Still, I must temper your claim that "there were no books in her lifetime to enable us to gain her sense of things." If by this you mean to echo the widely-held belief that her poetry was utterly sui generis during her lifetime, in fact that is not true. She WAS working out of a tradition, albeit one that is invisible now because it has been so thoroughly erased. Her rescue from the oblivion suffered by all her compeers (And why? The quality of her work, yes, but why else? Was she a less threatening token, because of her life choices, childlessness, eccentricities, than some of the haler women poets whose work more often than not turns out to share surprisingly much in common with her own in terms of voice, style, and imagery? ) only strengthens their invisibility. In 1987, while in grad school, I felt I needed to chair an MLA panel with the depressing title, "Nineteenth Century American Women Poets Other Than Dickinson," and 16 years later the situation has barely changed. ED may seem to have had a chthonic birth in relation to Emerson, but not in relation to Helen Hunt Jackson, Maria Lowell, and other poets she herself admired and in the context of which she situated her own work.

 

—Annie

 

I had, actually, a more narrow idea in mind — that different poets, even within specific traditions or tendencies, can have very different ideas of how their poems ought to look in published form. And while virtually every publisher I know of has some stories to tell about a particular poet who was hell to work with, combining perfectionism, paranoia & the limits of the physically (& financially) possible, it is the poet more often than not who is required to accept formatting compromises — and often enough outright errors — that will impact reception of the work. With Dickinson in particular, questions of linebreak & punctuation especially bedevil the process of identifying anything like a “true” text, yet these very impedimenta profoundly shape reader response. When Dickinson’s lyrics are editorially “normalized,” it is indeed possible to arrive at — as I recall being taught when I was a student at Berkeley circa 1970 — a poet whose entire corpus can be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. Leave them as we find them in Dickinson’s manuscripts & we get instead the most radical English-language poet of the 19^th century.