{"id":27639,"date":"2019-03-26T13:19:13","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T20:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/?p=27639"},"modified":"2019-03-27T21:39:17","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T04:39:17","slug":"re-discovering-simplicity-and-sacredness-in-emily-dickinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/2019\/03\/re-discovering-simplicity-and-sacredness-in-emily-dickinson\/","title":{"rendered":"Rediscovering Simplicity and Sacredness in Emily Dickinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poetry
\nGuest Commentary
\nby Alfred Clemente, Ph.D.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Emily
Emily Dickinson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
A rekindled love for the work of the literary maestra of Amherst – called forth by a gifted teacher, writer and dedicated curator of literature.<\/div>\n

It is a great pleasure to have Alfred Clemente’s reflections on Emily Dickinson appear as a guest commentary in Boston Arts Diary. A seasoned professor of literature, he exhibits in his writing, as in his teaching, a vivid and infectious passion for his subject, and a capacity to talk about it with a kind of jazz-like fluidity and immediacy, which this brief piece clearly demonstrates.
\n– Charles Munitz aka BADMan<\/em><\/p>\n

Emily Dickinson\u2019s poems have become a strange obsession for me. I can\u2019t wait at a red light without mentally racing through \u201cMuch Madness is Divinest Sense–\u201d or \u201cI can wade Grief–\u201d before the light changes. I don\u2019t mean that a stoplight moves me to either grief or insanity. It\u2019s just that so many of her poems have become my quotidian companions. I can\u2019t hold my finger under a running faucet, impatiently waiting for wintry water to warm, without muttering, \u201cThe Soul Selects her own Society–\u201d or \u201cTell all the Truth \/ but tell it slant–\u201d the latter often in Giuseppe Ierolli\u2019s Italian translation, \u201cDi tutta la verita ma dilla obliqua.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t wait at a red light without mentally racing through \u201cMuch Madness is Divinest Sense–\u201d or \u201cI can wade Grief–\u201d before the light changes.<\/div>\n

I\u2019ve always taught and admired Emily Dickinson\u2019s poems, but they were only one constellation in a sky of dazzling lights—whether Shakespeare\u2019s or Anne Sexton\u2019s, Billy Collins\u2019 or Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s, John Keats\u2019 or Edna St. Vincent Millay\u2019s. So many delights—too numerous to cite! Yet, in the past two years, the mysterious phantom of Amherst has re-entered my life with a resplendence I had not seen coming.<\/p>\n

…in the past two years, the mysterious phantom of Amherst has re-entered my life with a resplendence I had not seen coming.<\/div>\n

My fixation has even reached my grandchildren. This past year, after hearing me expatiate on the marvels of Dickinson\u2019s verse, sixteen-year-old Mackenzie poked a few keys on her cell phone and ordered a copy of Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s \u201cThe Essential Emily Dickinson.\u201d Mackenzie is now a card-carrying Emily fan. Twelve-year-old, bilingual Lana, whose mother is Japanese, has spent afternoons sitting next to me, on our living room couch, translating such poems as \u201cI\u2019m Nobody! Who are you?\u201d into Japanese, while I scour the Web to compare Italian, Spanish, and French translations.<\/p>\n

Such joy! But what, I ask, has caused this compulsion in me? Perhaps the same qualities (though not in these exact words) that the girls may have discerned: a distinctive and honest voice; a voice that confronts life\u2019s aches and ambiguities; a voice that echoes the heart as well as the mind; a voice whose wit and wisdom earn your trust; a voice that is unafraid; a voice that never kowtows to convention, whether in form or feeling. These are perhaps overblown words to describe what may be my granddaughters\u2019 more simple appreciations, but they define some of my responses.<\/p>\n

\"Emily
Emily Dickinson Herbarium
Houghton Library, Harvard University<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Of course, as a professor, I am also repeatedly charmed and excited by Emily Dickinson\u2019s verbal art, by her complex but accessible aesthetic— her flirtations with paradox, her defiance of expectation, her disarmingly simple eloquence. I am under the spell of her poignant honesty in \u201cThis is My Letter to the World \/ That never wrote to me–\u201d; or the exquisite marriage of form and feeling in \u201cI can wade Grief– \/ Whole pools of it–\u201d; or her paean to Nature in \u201cInebriate of Air–am I– \/ And Debauchee of Dew–\u201c; or her allegorical narratives, such as \u201cBecause I could not stop for Death– \/ He kindly stopped for me–\u201d. She bedazzles. She never disappoints.<\/p>\n

…a voice whose wit and wisdom earn your trust; a voice that is unafraid; a voice that never kowtows to convention, whether in form or feeling.<\/div>\n

I must admit, however, that the poet–as person–is a far larger province to explore than I have attempted thus far in my affectionate scrutiny of her lyrics. Yes, Emily Dickinson as prolifically creative recluse may not be her entire reality. One may, with some trepidation, describe the Emily Dickinson of \u201cWild Nights\u201d as the poet of frustrated passion, which may give added meaning to many of her poems. Nonetheless, the hundreds of poems she composed grow out of a broader compass of feeling than thwarted love. She was a verbal trickster, a singing psychologist, a philosopher and a poet who, in a mere thirty years, sang the truths of life and death and beauty in an astonishing 1775 poems.<\/p>\n

… her mysterious and miraculous clarity, her magic and honesty and insight–enacted and re-enacted again and again.<\/div>\n

Apart from his great dramas, Shakespeare wrote fewer than 160 poems–154 sonnets plus some longer poems. Keats, whom Dickinson cherished, wrote fewer than 150 poems, (though, in all fairness, he died very young.) Even the most prolific poets seldom write more than 200 poems. Yet Emily Dickinson, who had fewer than a dozen poems published in her entire lifetime, wrote nearly 1800 poems, most of them superb works of art–her mysterious and miraculous clarity, her magic and honesty and insight–enacted and re-enacted again and again.<\/p>\n

This is my immodest love letter to Emily Dickinson, 280 Main Street, Amherst, MA.<\/p>\n

Alfred Clemente, Ph.D.
\nMarch 20, 2019<\/p>\n

Alfred Clemente teaches American literature at Fordham University. He writes academic materials, arts criticism, poetry, and fiction. He has recently completed a novel and has begun work on a study of Emily Dickinson\u2019s poetry.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poetry
\nGuest Commentary
\nby Alfred Clemente, Ph.D.<\/strong>
\nA rekindled love for the work of the literary maestra of Amherst – called forth by a gifted teacher, writer and dedicated curator of literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[39,11],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-27639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-guest-commentary","7":"category-poetry","8":"entry","9":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27639"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27656,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27639\/revisions\/27656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}