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From time to time, my World Literature students give me a hard time for saying that every week is my favorite week. Around this time of the semester, I start to see their point. After already asserting that Hedda Gabler is my Absolute Favorite Thing to Teach, Ever, Seriously, I come to this week: Whitman and Dickinson, the two Absolutes, the godparents of American poetry, and, also, my Absolute Favorite Thing to Teach, Ever, Seriously.
Tomorrow, in my class, we’re going over Song of Myself. I guest-taught Dickinson in the lovely and incredibly talented Chantel Acevedo’s class this morning, in exchange for her wonderful lecture on Japan during my class’ discussion of The Narrow Road Through the Backcountry (our translator’s take — I am much more devoted to the title The Narrow Road to the Interior, as translated by Sam Hamill). It was a dry run for my own class on Thursday. We spent a lot of time discussing the myth of Emily Dickinson (for a brief lesson on this, please take a look at a real photo of Dickinson versus the doctored, feminized version they used for her books, complete with decidedly un-Dickinson ruffled collar and curls) and how even their anthology perpetuates this myth. And perpetuate it it does — as well as insulting her abilities as a poet. Chantel and I both use the Bedford Anthology of World Literature. I love the Bedford. I recommend the Bedford. I appreciate the Bedford’s translations of Japanese literature. But the Bedford’s gloss on one of Dickinson’s poems made me so furiously angry that I’m thinking of lodging a complaint. It reads, and I quote:
“Perhaps the most moving of Dickinson’s poems are those in which the metaphors go astray, poems whose direction seems to escape the determination of the poet.”
As if Dickinson doesn’t know what she’s doing, as if any brilliance is purely accidental, which is such a traditional, outdated, and clearly sexist view of women’s poetry that the editors should be ashamed of themselves. This melds exactly with Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s description of attitudes towards female poetry in Stealing the Language, one of the few books that I can say, without exaggeration, completely changed the direction of my work and my thinking about poetry (read it! read it!). And what poem is this, which escaped Dickinson’s control? “[My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --]” — one of the most deliberate and controlled poems in the English language. Perhaps the editors of the anthology should read Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” and then go sit in the corner for a time-out to think about what they’ve done.
In other news, you know that you work at a major football school when what worries you is not that someone drew a pornographic drawing on the dry erase board on your office door, but that next to this drawing, the person has scrolled the slogan of the rival team. This, this is an ill omen. This could be bad news.
Emma Bolden is the author of How To Recognize A Lady, a chapbook of poems published as part of Edge by Edge, the third in Toadlily Press' Quartet Series, and The Mariner's Wife, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press. Her third chapbook, The Sad Epistles, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She was the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference and was named a Finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation/Poetry magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in such journals as Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Feminist Studies, The Journal, Redivider, The Greensboro Review, and Verse. Her manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Prize. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown College, where she also serves as the poetry editor of the Georgetown Review.
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