So Susan Howe wrote a long, critical, philological, historical prose poem, My Emily Dickinson, and we're going to look at a few passages of it. I guess one of the questions we're going to end up with is why these writers, the language poets, so called, felt that Dickinson spoke to them. What is it about Dickinson that really drew them to her? So we'll begin by looking at a passage in My Emily Dickinson about Dickinson and Stein. She notices first that Harold Bloom and Hugh Kenner and folks like them drop their names and ignore their works in canonical criticism. Or do some kind of biographical stuff about their eccentricities and kind of lovely strangeness. Madwoman in the Attic in the case of Dickinson. And then in this passage Howe turns to some very powerful ideas here. Dickinson and Stein meet each other along the paths of the self that begin and end in contradiction. And that subversion attracts them. So let me read a little passage here, and you guys can interpret it. In prose and in poetry, she explored the implications of breaking the law. This is Dickinson. Just short of breaking off communication with the reader. Starting from scratch, she exploded habits of standard human intercourse as she cut across the customary, chronological linearity of poetry. What could Susan Howe mean by that and why embrace that value in Dickinson? Look back to the 19th Century and what does it tell us about the poetry we've been talking about this week? Who wants to start? Kristen, what does it mean to say that Emily Dickinson, she's in a room in Amherst, how could she be breaking the law? >> Well breaking the laws of grammar, you know. Emily Dickinson's syntax is extremely unusual for her time period as we talked about when [CROSSTALK] >> And for ours, I think. >> Originally. Yeah, I mean she's got all of these dashes and the line breaks are strange. >> Capitalization. >> And capitalization's very strange. >> But more. I mean, what Rae Armantrout calls her, I think, witchy word choice. >> Mm-hm. Where every word has, it's open to the reader's interpretation. >> Why does Susan Howe embrace this as breaking the law? Is there something illegal about Emily Dickinson? Contraband? >> I wouldn't say illegal or contraband. >> I'm being funny. >> Yeah. I mean Howe [LAUGH] appreciates what Emily Dickinson is doing because she's kind of not making language new in the Williams sense, but she's opening it up to reader participation. >> Why would anyone, Molly, seek to break off to get toward breaking off communication with the reader? I thought these language poets were all about a new kind of relationship with the reader. >> I think they believe that in order for that communication with the reader to be successful that you have to break it. You can't use this traditional, conventional form to really get at the heart of issues of communication. >> So what does it risk? Can you imagine a writing that breaks off communication entirely with the reader? >> Well, I think it goes back to Hogenian's undone is not the same thing as not done in the sense that breaking off conventional forms of communication creates a space for a new kind because Dickinson was so focused on a life of the consciousness and recreating the consciousness in her house of possibility. So by perhaps shocking the readers of her time with a new grammar that took some time to become familiar with, she opened the space for the language poets to inhabit. >> She pairs Dickinson with Stein, which is not something that I think the Dickinsonians before this time had done much of, because as she acknowledges, they're very different personalities. But she talks about Stein and then she says, Howe does, repetition, surprise alliteration, odd rhyme and rhythm, dislocation deconstruction to restore the original clarity of each word skeleton, both women, Dickinson and Stein, lifted the load of European literary custom. Adopting old strategies, they reviewed and reinvented them. Anything need to be said about that? Where's Stein fit into this? It's okay to repeat something that we've said before. Repetition being the word of the day. Where does Stein fit in this? Molly? >> Well Stein is really interested in stripping the baggage, and the associations of each word, to really get to what the word is representing. She's into building these subject relationships by trying words in different ways, and different word pairings. And you can't do that with traditional descriptions. >> Okay. So we have Stein and Dickinson, and finally in this passage, Susan Howe says, Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein also conducted a skillful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authority over literary history. Who polices questions of grammar, this is a question that I've been paraphrasing for a long time. Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection, and connotation? Who's order is shut inside the structure of a sentence what in our articulation releases the coils and complications of Sayings', capital s, Sayings' assertion? In very different ways, the counter movement of these two women's work penetrates to the indefinite limits of written communication. >> I think this is like probably one of the most important things that we'll read in all of My Emily Dickinson because what she's saying is that what Dickinson and Stein were able to do with their unconventional language syntax, you know. >> Mm-hm. >> Subject matters, constructions, whatever. They were able to pose the question of who polices questions of grammar. And maybe the answer to that question, and this is what they're kind of pushing against, is that the patriarchal male dominated literary cannon are the ones that police questions of grammar parses to each connection, connotation. >> In the case of Dickinson, editors literally took dashes away, fixed rhymes. >> Uncapitalized, I mean, it totally >> So that's what might be meant in the Dickinsonian example particularly but more generally, who polices questions of grammar? What's actually the answer, Emily Harnett, in your life as a student, who polices questions of grammar? >> Teachers. >> And parts of speech. Teachers. And how do they do it? >> Red pens, papers. >> And? And, not in your case, because you always get As, but- >> Clearly. >> They can give you a B-. Has anybody here at this table as an American student ever written a paper and gotten it corrected? I think the teachers still say, I'm correcting papers, right. And been penalized for writing a little bit out of the box. Anybody? >> Yeah, in elementary school and in junior high school. >> Okay who polices questions of grammar when the teachers are no longer there? I think you have a BA. Yes? >> I do. >> So you don't have any teachers officially. >> No, not right now. >> I'm kind of not really counting in this case. >> [LAUGH] I do. >> You do, of course. Why do you do that? >> To have my language be something that society recognizes. Something that I can communicate with. >> And what's at risk if you break the laws just short of cutting off communication with that world that you seem to be committed to communicating with? >> I mean, as someone who aspires to be a writer, I would have no audience. >> So there's a risk of having no audience, and really Dickinson essentially didn't have an audience of her time. So, why is Susan Howe valorizing a writer who wrote and had no audience in her time? >> Maybe having no audience is why she could do what she did. I don't know, maybe. >> Max? >> That- >> Is this relevant? >> She tried to get her poems published at some point, so she definitely wanted- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah we can quibble with all that, but essentially, Susan Howe is embracing someone who broke the laws, the laws that, so Kristen is a law abiding citizen. >> For the most part. >> Yeah, I don't mean to make you into a straw writer. She's a law abiding user of language. Emily Dickinson was a law breaker. Susan Howe is embracing the law breaker. And she's saying something large. Who polices questions and grammar parts of speech connection and connotation? It is Susan Howe that's saying she's not a traditional feminist but here she's being just about as adamant and just about as radical as you can possibly be by taking that grammatical super ego that has been naturalized in the mind of this particular writer, Kristen Martin. And she's saying you've assumed something that's a particular enforcement of a particular kind of literary history. Patriarchal is almost a stand-in word. It's really about the buzz of empire building and the excitement of gilded wealth of the 19th century. This is a big resistance. Where were we, Max? >> I don't know, where were we? >> [LAUGH] >> Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence? And what inarticulation releases the coils and complications of saying this assertion. And finally, you can respond to any of this, in very different ways the countermovement of these two women's work, Stein and Dickinson, penetrates to language poetry, language poetry. The indefinite limits of written communication. >> I think it's interesting that she's pointing to Dickinson as someone who's, or she's pointing to this idea of breaking the law up until a point, she doesn't break the law entirely. And the lineage here I think, or that maybe we're implying or that we're trying to make between Dickinson and the language poets is evident in the and the that we read for instance, where they're also breaking the laws of narrative or a form. But only up until a point. >> Of what a life, how a life gets told about. >> Sure, but their intervention only goes so far, and they're still using sentences. They're still using a sort of logic of communication, something that we recognize, even if they are rearranging the sentences. They could've gone further. They could of just- >> And they did in their writings. >> Sure but in the ones that we read it's- >> Yes, but isn't it, I mean I would suggest, submit to you that it's even more powerful, more radical that each of them take a sentence that in most cases is a grammatically complete sentence and set it next to another one and defy us to apply our conventional syllogistic logic to the two of them. That's really playing with conventional meaning, particularly when it's describing life. But what you're saying is that there's a certain moderation involved in some of the ways in which the language- >> Well, it's a balance, definitely. >> But I don't think there's a lot of moderation in this line of Howe's. In very different ways, the counter movement of these two women's work penetrates to the indefinite limits of written communication. Who wants to speak to that phrase? >> Well, it's like you don't have to write, I guess in the kind of canonized modes that they are sort of pushing against to communicate something. That language actually has infinite possibilities if you choose to exploit them. >> I was thinking about the idea of language being political in two different aspects. In the one hand, conforming to standard English would mean conforming to the way that a certain socioeconomic class speaks. And in that way, it creates a political order that classifies others as less legitimate. So female poets, black poets, gay poets would suddenly have an inferior sub-genre of poetry, in the Shakespearean sense. Which seems unfair if you're trying to recreate the social order in a way that all voices are heard or equally respected. And on the other side of that, in the idea of that there's order within grammar, I think Stein was trying to impact the idea that instead of privileging the verb and the noun, she instead focused on prepositions and pronouns in order to show that even just by disordering it, all those words still had resonance and meaning on their own. I don't think she was consciously trying to be familiar in any sort of way. >> Those kinds of words for her are the glue that potentially holds it all together, and really our investigation should be investigating, here's, it's a metaphor, investigating the glue, which is a little less interested in the things that the glue holds together. Let's look at another passage by Howe about Dickinson. I'll just read a couple of lines and then you can help me understand it. Dickinson took the scraps from separate higher female education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, and combined them with voracious and unladylike outside reading. She got into all kinds of areas that were fairly untraditional In an environment where confident, masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse. Meantime, she went into geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, philology, etc. Sheltered women audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. Hesitate, from the Latin stem or stick. Quotes Rustin, he may pause, but he must not hesitate. She means that negatively. And then she says, hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal empire building. And then she hesitated. Why does she say this, why is she embracing stammering and hesitation? Emily? >> Because it's an unwillingness to be overconfident, it shows self-reflection and reflectiveness, a commitment to saying the right thing rather than just saying something. >> Good, that's a good start. Dave? >> Maybe an undermining of the authority of the speaker of the poem. This is what I'm conveying, you are receiving it. Maybe she's undermining that dynamic. >> I know how to speak, you don't. Learn how to speak and you will be articulate. And you will get to articulate all the values that are naturalized and assumed in the way I speak. Right, and by refusing to do that, by stammering, by hesitating you're basically foregrounding confusion in the face of confidence. Molly? >> And I think hesitation opens up those spaces we talked about in reading Solomon's work. Between the sentences, between the lines, the 27th letter of the alphabet. Where we can come in and bring our experience to the poem. >> Good. Before we move on, let's focus on this line. This sentence, hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal, she used the word brutal, empire-building. What do we do with that? That's fairly, that's a political thing. And what is her reading of Dickinson in this regard? What's she doing there? >> She's suggesting that hesitation is a political act. It's a rejection of that culture of aggression, the American culture of the time. >> What do you normally think of hesitation? And stammering. >> Of weakness. >> Weakness and an inability to understand. Let's turn that completely around she says. This is why the poetry of Howe and her colleagues often will feature hesitation and stammering. I love the stammering in the Bernstein poem where he gets the idiom wrong. And he's reading it and deliberately adds the preposition onto the idiom. And making it not quite make sense. Or even if Ashbury in a lyric poem like Some Trees, where we meet. Out of, we meet somewhere as far from the world as agreeing with it. That kind of mixed idioms that makes no sense. If we really spend a little time with it, we realize that its stammer is very, very resistant mode. This is so Dickinson becomes a powerful form of social and political resistance, which is not the Dickinson that I learned as a kid for sure. And in fact, it's time to reveal, reveal, it sounds like there's something up my sleeve. It's time to say that the Dickinson that we studied in this course is really Howe's Dickinson. I don't know whose Whitman we were studying, but I know whose Dickenson we were studying. The Dickenson who surprises us with her conceits. Who won't sit still. The Dickenson for whom as Hajinian said that language won't stand still. Language is restless. The restless world that this is for Dickenson is a world in which every witchy word choice is insufficient and needs to be abandoned for another place immediately, not in the next poem but within the poem itself. And speaking of that let's look at My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun briefly because as a matter of fact so much has been said about this poem. I don't expect us to do a close reading, all I want to do is ask you finally why is it that Emily Dickinson, that Susan Howe would write a whole book that riffs again and again on this one poem? What is it about this poem that would seem to satisfy How's urged to find a forbearer for her ideas about language. What is it about this poem that makes it right for her? Kristin? >> There's just so many things going on in it, and there's so much subversion, and every time you feel like you've got what one system of meaning is, it turns around on itself. So in the beginning, we think my life had stood a loaded gun means that Emily Dickinson is a loaded gun, but not really, it's her life that's a loaded gun. And then the gun has the power, but she also has a master that she's answering to and who had the power in that relationship, and there's just so much political meaning in it that it becomes a poem It's a war problem, really. It's about the Civil War and Howe thinks of herself as a poet who wants to talk about appropriation and a frontier and war, so it's perfect for Howe. >> Good, good start. Who wants to add to that? >> I mean for me this poem is all about potential. >> The potential of what? >> Well in the first line, the potential of a loaded gun, the gun's loaded but its not been fired yet that there's like. >> There's nothing more, I think the NRA makes a big deal out of it. If there's some kind of logic. No seriously the loaded gun is as if something that has all that potential and of course their line is you have to use agency in order to fire it. So I'm not sure how that works out but loaded gun is just powerful. It's powerful. It's more powerful than the gun that's been shot or the gun that's in the act of shooting. >> Mm-hm. >> Yeah so that's powerful. And that's an analogy to what? I mean it's not just about a gun, right? >> No. >> What's this potential here? >> I'll read her earlier line again just to jog your memory. In a very different way, the counter movement of these two women's work, Dickens and Stine, penetrates the indefinite limits of written communication. What's it an analogy to? Queen of the meta? >> [LAUGH] I was just thinking about exactly what Kristen was saying, how it's indeterminate, the word and what it's referencing. And all these relationships could easily switch places and roles. In the same way that perhaps she's referring to a romantic relationship. That seems to be what the middle portion is about, but I was thinking about it. >> Of all the poems that Dickinson wrote, 1770 of them, this may be the one that we're still grappling with and we really don't have. Thanks to Susan Howe we know a lot more about it. We could go on and on and on. Decades. Well, centuries. And not know much more about this. How is that possible? How did language get to be this way? Do we just want to nod and say my God? >> [LAUGH] >> What are we going to do? With this. This is the thing, this is openness. That this woman in Amherst could have written a poem like this, and we're still trying to figure it out. So okay, here we go. This is the last question, we're going to wrap up. What's it about then? This is hard what's it about? >> Isn't that just the point. It's about what ever the reader will take away from it. >> Is it anything goes? Are we really going to get our- >> Anything goes. >> It's not anything goes we're working harder. >> But it's written in such a way with the confusion of the subject here and there. Some of the tense changes, that it's intentionally ambiguous. You could take a bunch of different things of it. >> But I think it's about her poetic voice and the power of that. She's telling us that she can, it's violent. She can kill you with this poem. She can change the world. >> Look out. In a way, we're all that mill. Every one of us is a mill by the stream. And Dickinson unleashes the power of the flood, her brain, her thinking. Way off the tracks, and way out of the box. And we are trodden upon. Well I mean unless we mix the metaphor again on the board. >> [LAUGH] >> The mill- >> [INAUDIBLE] Or what, the mill or [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGH]. >> We don't know. It's very hard to stand still and know where you are. The mill represents economic and social convention. Were producing power in a conventional way, the New England way in the 19th century, and mills are long forgotten in that regard. But this, the power of the imagination, the power of the mind to think and go where it's going to go is alive and well and I think that this generation of poets They wanted to recapture that radical spirit. The power of imagination without creating a romantic ideology of the imagination. The way the romantic state and maybe someone like Wall Stevens did in the 20th century. So, what's it about? Last round next Well, it's about a few different things. [LAUGH] There is something just so, there's something so ominous about that last stanza that's, that it's ominous because it's so unclear I think. And that's [CROSSTALK] >> Good, let's end with it. Go I, then he may longer live. One might live longer than he. He longer must than I. That's fair enough. >> Yeah. >> So here's the reason why. It's true what I just said, she says, for I have but the power to kill without the power to die. OK, Max, you opened the door. >> And it is because it's so sort of syntactically naughty and then clear or open that it's hard to say exactly what she means. For I have but the power to kill, but the power to die. It's either that she's just this force that kills without dying herself. But first, the two lines preceding this complicate that. He must live longer than her, because he's the one who does at the end of the day, I guess to go back to the NRA thing, he, the owner of the gun is the one with the agency to fire the gun. And without him that she just lays a loaded gun, just that potential. >> How is Dickinson seen without agency in this context. Yes but in the end whose still here. >> Exactly. >> Can't kill this. This is Sid Corman all over again right. As long as I exist, well actually I think that she's even more powerful than that. >> She doesn't need us. >> [LAUGH] >> She doesn't need us, but she's still there, and I think this is more powerful than a loaded gun. I'm speechless. Anyways, so good. Susan Howe embraces Dickinson and we sort of understand why, so we move forward from here.
