Category: conversation

Transplanted

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

X


AS if some little Arctic flower,
Upon the polar hem,
Went wandering down the latitudes,
Until it puzzled came


To continents of summer,
To firmaments of sun,
To strange, bright crowds of flowers,
And birds of foreign tongue!


I say, as if this little flower
To Eden wandered in—
What then? Why, nothing, only
Your inference therefrom!

~Emily Dickinson

Brenna: Things I love about this poem:

1) Personification of little wandering flower = adorable.

2) There is not a complete sentence in the entire poem–no completed thought–which works really, really well, since the whole point of the poem is to not tell the reader exactly what she’s thinking–to not complete her own thought, but imply it. This brings me to

3) Emily is SO VERY flirty. This is the kind of poem that makes me think she didn’t get married because she just didn’t want to. Girlfriend must have been able to flirt with the best of them. She is so coy.

Pam: I love your second point! Yes. Having the unfinished sentences makes sense if you are trying to obscure the meaning. However, I do not see the flirting at all.

Brenna: It’s the elusiveness.

Pam: I am immediately thrown by how off the meter feels, especially in that last line. I feel like I need to go over this with a ruler and count out syllables and stresses.

Brenna: The “I have something to say but I’m not going to tell you, you have to guess” aspect of it.

Pam: “your inference therefrom” breaks the entire meter from every previous line. Emily.

Brenna: Apparently she could be quite the flirt, and sent Valentines to young men at her father’s office. I could see this being the text of some nineteenth-century Valentine.

Brenna: She breaks meter maybe because she’s breaking her train of thought.

Pam: Yes, because in this line, she’s addressing “you”!

Brenna: Yes!

Pam: So perhaps we’ve switched from flower poem traipsing around to talking to the subject of her affections?

Brenna: Yes. I think she’s saying that meeting him (whoever) is like being a little Arctic flower (small, plain, pale) traveling to exotic locales, winding up in Eden and seeing–oooh, she can’t say “him,” that’s just way too forward.

Brenna: I think Miss Always-Wears-White is the little Arctic flower. My working theory now is that for Emily, cold = passion.

Pam: The idea of an Arctic flower is just so Mary Sue to me. I love it. “I know flowers don’t usually grow in the Arctic, but THIS ONE does, and it’s special, and this shows how determined it is.”

Brenna: But there are Arctic flowers, right? During the spring/summer? Things bloom there. Of course, they’re more ephemeral. And rare. Because DEATH. And because nobody is quite like Emily.

Brenna: It’s a little bit vain, in an oddly closeted way. EMILY HUMBLEBRAG.

Pam: Apparently, there are Arctic flowers! Shows you what I know about different climates. And she would have known this, I’m sure, as an avid gardener. Aside: look up Arctic cotton grass. It is ADORABLE

Brenna: Okay, that is an adorable plant.

Pam: I want to squeeze it. I’m wondering now which plant she was imagining as her Arctic flower.

Brenna: It’s like a tiny Muppet on a stalk! And I would bet you cash money it’s a white one.

Pam: Well, if the “bright crowds of flowers” are strange, I bet you’re right.
The little white Arctic flower descending down to see the colorful, common flowers!

Brenna: It’s a perfect metaphor for the agoraphobic. All of us introverts are wallflowers when thrown into a room of gorgeous, gaudy people.

Pam: There’s such a lovely sentiment at the end, too. Being in this unknown person’s presence is like a flower wandering back to Eden.

Brenna: Yes! It’s as if she’s found her original habitat, her true home.

Pam: Yes! You can absolutely feel the “I don’t belong here” vibe.

Brenna: And the birds. Always with the birds, this one.

Pam: Which ties in even more to the broken meter at the end. It goes completely passive. The stresses just disappear.

Brenna: Because her stress melts away in the presence of this mystery-person. That might be going a bit far…. I am apparently feeling quite literal today.

Pam: Ha, or she loses personality or authority! It’s like having a big speech prepared and then seeing a cute guy and then you mumble, “Hey, hi, hello,” and scutter off.

Brenna: If I had an Arctic cotton grass for every time that’s happened…

In which we discover that we are adequate.

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

CIX

OF bronze and blaze
The north, to-night!
So adequate its forms,
So preconcerted with itself,
So distant to alarms,—
An unconcern so sovereign
To universe, or me,
It paints my simple spirit
With tints of majesty,
Till I take vaster attitudes,
And strut upon my stem,
Disdaining men and oxygen,
For arrogance of them.
My splendors are menagerie;
But their competeless show
Will entertain the centuries
When I am, long ago,
An island in dishonored grass,
Whom none but daisies know.

~Emily Dickinson

Brenna: The opening sentence is gorgeous, almost overwhelmingly beautiful–and then in the next sentence she hits us with how “adequate” its forms are, and I kind of snort-laugh. “The aurora borealis is amazing and beautiful and….adequate!”

Pam: This. What is even happening? I just read through it. I feel like I’ve misplaced brain cells. I have no idea what is happening here. You’re absolutely right about the gorgeous imagery and then the strange turn to “adequate.” And then we have “preconcerted,” which apparently means “arranged or organized in advance.” How can you be preconcerted with yourself? “When I am, long ago.” What even. I have lost all powers of language.

Brenna: Ohhhh, I love that! That is my favorite part!

Pam: Tell me what it means!!

Brenna: I don’t know?? But I have THOUGHTS.

Pam: I am waiting patiently, long ago.

Brenna: Okay, so she says that, as mighty and important as the aurora has made her feel in the first stanza, she will eventually die (because Emily Dickinson), while the northern lights will continue.

Pam: The island is her gravestone! Okay. That pieced it together. I’m glad you’re here with a guidebook.

Brenna: And then she does the amazing thing. She starts out using the future tense: “When I am…” And then she whips it around within the same sentence to the past tense: When she is dead long ago, i.e. when she has been dead for a long time. She’s seeing her own past in the future. Emily is badass.

Pam: She’s looking forward to a time when her grave is in forgotten grass, where only flowers know about her.

Brenna: Yes! When she is pushing daisies. When she has become daisies. I love the time warp in that second stanza. I think it’s glorious. Emily Dickinson is so metal.

Pam: Which, of course, hasn’t happened yet! Such a strange little moebius strip of reasoning that cannot become true because of her postmortem poetic fame. She will never have that prediction come true, most likely, but the poem (which outlives her) keeps this premonition alive and also incorrect.

Brenna: Well-said!

Pam: I also think it’s glorious now that you’ve explained it.

Brenna: Isn’t it fantastic?

Pam: She’s doing this earlier in the poem, too! “Till I take vaster attitudes, / And strut upon my stem”: when, in the future, I am an actual flower.
She’s conflated with the aurora borealis, too! It’s eternal; it’s not going anywhere. She’s imagining a future where she is dead and her remains have become flowers, which are also impermanent, but they reseed and come back over and over again.

Brenna: And like the aurora, she will be incorporeal. It’s a pretty amazing poem. Pam. PAM. Are we starting to……UNDERSTAND Emily Dickinson??

Pam: I feel like if I agree that we understand her, we will be cursed.

Brenna: That’s not good. We are in TROUBLE. No, WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU, EMILY. Haunt us no more!!

Pam: Just looking at the two poems previous this one in the book–no, I do not understand her. Yet!

Brenna: Wait….I said we’re starting to understand her. I qualified it. We are not cursed. Whew!!

Pam: Qualifiers are important! Walking back from the ledge.

Brenna: Walk it back, Pam!!

Pam: We are adequate!

Brenna: We are so adequate. Competelessly adequate. I love how excited she gets about herself in this poem. She takes “vaster attitudes,” “struts,” and disdains men and oxygen. That should be this blog’s tagline. “Disdaining men and oxygen.

Pam: YES. She is feeling her splendors in this poem.

Brenna: They are menagerie! But then once again, nature puts E.D. in her place. SMACK. “You are PUSHING DAISIES.” And why is the grass “dishonored”?

Pam: That’s a good question. Maybe not dishonored the way we think of it, but literally not honored by visitors? Forgotten?

Brenna: This poem raises a really interesting question again–did she want recognition? In some poems it feels as if she’s longing for it. In others, she wants to be “nobody.” In this poem, she goes from being nobody to spendiloquent to nobody again.

Pam: Oh, wonderful question. I wonder, too, if perhaps recognition–the desire for it–is something she grappled with, and poems like these are moves toward accepting her belief that she will not have recognition.

Brenna: Ah, this seems like a good working theory! And she reminds herself that it’s okay, in the grand scheme of things. Nature is what endures. And she does, in the very real biological sense of becoming daisies. But her display is homely and small and forgotten, overlooked, unlike the aurora, which demands attention.

Pam: Yes! What a wonderful thing to pull out. She’s in earthly planes with the homely daisies, and still underneath the splendor of the aurora.

Brenna: She still gets to witness it, or at least be in its presence.

Pam: Amelia just came in and said, “Mommy, tell me what my name is.” I told her. She said, “No, I’m a MYSTERYYYYYY.” So I think she understands Emily better than we do.

Brenna: Emily Dickinson: 20. Pam and Brenna: 2. Amelia: WINNING.

Pam: Are we at 20?

Brenna: 22!

Pam: Holy cow, we’re at 22! 22 Dickinson poems! We’ve gone past blackjack!

Brenna: Our blog can drink!

Pam [flipping through the book]: “A toad can die of light.” What.

A tantalizing poem

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

A PRECIOUS, mouldering pleasure ’t is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think,
His venerable hand to take,
And warming in our own,
A passage back, or two, to make
To times when he was young.
His quaint opinions to inspect,
His knowledge to unfold
On what concerns our mutual mind,
The literature of old;


What interested scholars most,
What competitions ran
When Plato was a certainty,
And Sophocles a man;


When Sappho was a living girl,
And Beatrice wore
The gown that Dante deified.
Facts, centuries before,


He traverses familiar,
As one should come to town
And tell you all your dreams were true:
He lived where dreams were born.


His presence is enchantment,
You beg him not to go;
Old volumes shake their vellum heads
And tantalize, just so.

~Emily Dickinson

Pam: This poem embodies really every Emily Dickinson poem ever. Old poem! Yes! What does she have to tell us? What am I going to learn from this? Birds? Bees? Pastoral? Yes! This is beautiful! . . . wait. What does the last line mean? This doesn’t make any sense? Why is it over? Why can’t I ask her what it means???

Brenna: Okay, so my first thought is–BOOKS! YAY! This is NOT A POEM ABOUT DEATH!!! And then I start reading, and I remember that, doh, this is Emily Dickinson, and this is totally a poem about death.

Pam: It’s ALWAYS a poem about death.

Brenna: It always is. Death is Emily Dickinson’s BIG MOOD. Okay, so in this particular poem about death…

Pam: I do love that she describes the book as “mouldering.” I feel that usually when we see that word, it’s describing dead bodies. This feels pretty Poe of her.

Brenna: It really does! Poe-riffic!

Pam: Death: of the book! Of the ideas expressed in the book, because the era of the author is long gone!

Brenna: And the juxtaposition of “pleasure” with “mouldering”…very “Fall of the House of Usher.”

Pam: Yes! A “mouldering pleasure.” Gross, and I also get it! The smell of books. Or maybe I’m just thinking of the slightly sweet mildewy smell of old books.

Brenna: I remember reading this years ago, before social media and Kindles and such, and it didn’t hit me in quite the same way it does now. This poem is APT, yo. It could be a poem written yesterday by one of the “e-readers are blasphemy” crowd.

Pam: Oh, bless. As if any method of ingesting books could be bad. At the same time, I really, really love an old book. I’m talking old. The spine has cracked. The glue has disappeared to parts unknown. The pages are dog-eared or torn or falling out. The edges are worn soft. I love that. When you get a book that old, and you let it flip open, and it falls to the same place every time and you can kind of guess that this was an important passage to somebody, so this is where they turned to a lot? I eat that right up.

Brenna: So. To sum up: She likes old books and she cannot lie.

Pam: You other poets can’t deny. We cannot do this entire song. We COULD do this entire song. But we should not do this entire song.

Brenna: When a book walks in with an itty-bitty spine and–okay. We will not do the entire song.

Pam: We will probably end up doing the entire song and posting it as an Easter egg somewhere.

Brenna: Someday people will search for it.

Pam: God bless these people.

Brenna: It will be like READY PLAYER ONE, but for the other kind of nerds.

Pam: The really desperate ones?

Brenna: The book ones. US, Pamela. !!

Pam: THE REALLY DESPERATE ONES

Brenna: DYING

Pam: Girl, you know it’s true.

Brenna: Wait–is that Sir Mixalot??

Pam: Milli Vanilli.

Brenna: RIGHT. PAM. DEAD.

Brenna: I’ma just blame that one on the rain and move on.

Pam: NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo

Pam: You out-Milli-Vanilli-d me.

Brenna: I WIN. I’m too sexy for this chat, too sexy for this chat…Okay. POEM. FOCUS, Pam and Brenna.

Pam: I feel like this is the rare Emily Dickinson poem that’s just doing what it says on the tin!

Brenna: I really, really want to believe that.

Pam: This is like something a stoner would conceive of. Wow, old books are cool. Isn’t it weird how the people who wrote this are dead? Okay, bye.

Brenna: And yet, I feel like she’s weaving in all these references to mortality, and those have to mean something.

Pam: How much is Emily Dickinson the poet wondering whether people might read her in the future and beg of her in the same way not to go? For somebody who wrote so prolifically and published so incredibly rarely–and asked that her papers be burned, I think–she had to have considered it, right? So maybe she really is wondering a little bit about her own authorial immortality?

Brenna: She invokes Plato, Sappho, Sophocles, Dante–all these classical greats. She is also careful to underscore their mortality.

Pam: And then there’s the whole other issue of the folks who published her works after her death, and who edited them as well–so even though she has attained this kind of immortality, the words that became famous after her death were not printed as she wrote them. It’s nice that she includes Sappho, too. One could probably have a field day researching and following that down the rabbit hole.

Brenna: Her words appeared “in just the dress her century wore,” in that sense. In the sense of being sanitized for proper punctuation. From the Dickinson museum, here’s some info: https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/book/export/html/108

Pam: We Need To Read A Bio.

Brenna: TL;DR–a few of her poems were published, but it’s unclear whether she okayed this. No one knows if she wanted to be published or not.

Pam: I read something earlier today (not sure where) that she was also a prolific gardener, and used to send “posies” to her friends, along with scraps of poetry. I think Dickinson reported (or at least thought) that her friends were happier with the flowers than the verse.

Brenna: What is up with the ending? It does seem like a fairly straightforward poem, up until the point where she’s begging a book not to go and it is tantalizing her.

Pam: It’s weird, right? She always does this! I really do look at this poem the way that I look at most of her poems. I’m trucking along, and I think I get it, and then there’s a hard left turn.

Brenna: YES. It’s as if every poem is a riddle.

Pam: The reader begs “him,” the book, not to go in the way that we, the readers, are begging her not to end the poem there. So in that sense, if it’s intentional, it’s a great example of what she’s just shown us in the poem. And I can’t believe that it’s unintentional.

Brenna: But how can a book possibly “go”? In what world outside of a Miyazaki film does this make sense?

Pam: It ends!

Brenna: OOOOH. DUH.

Pam: I read it as, “Book, you are so interesting, please don’t end!” But you can’t stop it from ending.

Brenna: Wow I feel dumb.

Pam: You are not dumb!!

Brenna: I think you figured it out. Pam. YOU WIN THE POEM.

Pam: And the volume shaking its head = closing the book? WE’VE DONE IT. WE GOT ONE POEM. 1/365 is not a bad ratio, yes?

Brenna: Only three hundred and something-ty more days to go!!!

Pam:

😂

A not-so-secret conversation

Pam and BrennaLeave a comment

SOME things that fly there be,—
Birds, hours, the bumble-bee:
Of these no elegy.
Some things that stay there be,—
Grief, hills, eternity:
Nor this behooveth me.
There are, that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the riddle lies!

~Emily Dickinson

Editor’s Note:  This conversation has been heavily hacked in the interest of anyone  making any sense of it. Topics edited from this transcript include but are by  no means limited to Anglo-Saxon riddles, Brenna’s theatrical angst, the epic saga of Pam reading a  biography of Hamilton, a book that Pam actually did finish reading but isn’t sure she should have, the resulting excoriation of books about blonde Amazons, and nicknames referencing fish.

Pam: My first question is this: why did we choose this poem?

Brenna: We chose this poem because I flipped through the book and landed on it.

Pam: The secret of this poem is that it is a Carrollesque riddle. So chance is laughing at us.

Brenna: Okay, full disclosure: I chose this poem because I don’t understand it. As of this point, I have two different criteria for selecting E. D. poems: 1) the poem somehow fits the specific day/month/season, or 2) I don’t get it and I am really, really hoping you will explain it to me.

Pam: I chose yesterday’s poem because I wanted a sunny poem. I do not understand this one at all. BUT. Shall we attempt to come up with plausible explanations which cannot be proven at all?

Brenna: Sure! SO. Poem. Who titled this poem? Did E.D. title it? Or was it retroactively titled? Either way, it feels like some kind of smug joke. The title, that is. “I have a secret, but I’m not telling you! Especially NOT in this poem!”

Pam: The secret is that you will NEVER understand this poem.

Brenna: Oh, okay. I think you’ve got it. CASE CLOSED.

Pam: Some things fly: birds, hours, bees. Of these, she’s not writing any elegy; she’s not mourning them. Or somebody isn’t writing an elegy. Either the author is personally not mourning them, or the author is noting that these things are not mourned after they’ve departed.

Brenna: Or she’s not memorializing or reflecting on them. “Elegy” can be a lament, but doesn’t have to be, according to my just-now super-sketch Google analysis. Maybe, because they’re fleeting, she’s not going to dwell on them?

Pam: Elegy doesn’t have to be a reflection on the dead . . . but it’s usually a reflection on the dead.

Brenna: True–and birds, hours, bees all die quickly. They’re sort of defined by their ephemeral nature. “Birds, hours, bees–meh. Why would I write of such things? (despite the fact that this is literally what I write about).”

Pam: Stanza 2: some things remain forever; grief, hills, eternity. “Nor this behooveth me”: this is not my responsibility. But what isn’t her responsibility? The elegy from the first stanza? Eternity?

Brenna: I think she’s dismissing the things in stanzas 1 and 2 equally.

Pam: There’s no point mourning things that die, or time that has passed, because that’s how those things work. There’s no point in worrying about the length of grief or the prospect of eternity because you can’t change those, either.

Brenna: Stanza 3: “There are, that resting, rise”–she is deliberately leaving out the subject of the sentence.It’s a secret, a mystery. [shakes fist in general direction of Amherst]

Pam: She is deliberately being a jerk.

Brenna: Such a jerk. E.D., Mean-girl.

Pam: Mean-girl OG. But it’s Dickinson. Rest. Rest in peace? We’re talking about dead spirits who have risen, perhaps? Can she explain the skies? No, she cannot.

Brenna: Does she herself not know the answer? Maybe she’s not being mean or smug or secretive–maybe she’s struggling to express the inexpressible.

Pam: How still the riddle lies: this, for me, ties into the “rest” in the first line of this stanza. The riddle is death, or what happens to the soul afterward; the riddle is thereby still because the body is dead and unmoving. Perhaps a little bit of “why am I trying to explain this when it’s inexplicable? Why am I trying to figure this out when it’s unknowable?” “Still” is also in contrast to all of the things in stanza one–bees, birds, time. But: can grief die? Can hills? Can immortality? Is that the riddle? I love trying to figure these out, but I also feel a little bit like I’m in the labyrinth and I’ve run out of string, so I must go back to the beginning without having located the center.

Brenna: My brain hurts.

Pam: I feel like we need to add in a Dickinson biography to this project!

Brenna: I want to say that this is a good idea, but I am afeard. But we should read a Dickinson biography. We should. Should should should.

Pam: We should! But will we?

Brenna: YOU KNOW US SO WELL.