“Affinity, not Identity” Donna Hartway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”




I am haunted by Emily Dickinson.

I must acknowledge the transgressiveness of spirit it requires for someone like me to take on Academic Writing of this kind. I have hit my ball into your yard, boys, and I am afraid to ring your bell. I can hear that vicious dog of should and shouldn’t and there now behind your big iron gate. But here I am. And as my sister says: I cannot stop for that. You see, I am traveling incognito. I do not even have a Doctorate – I never even started one – I have Hush now. Can you hear it? – an MFA in Creative Writing. And I see your tight smile, I see you rub your shoe in the carpet. I hear you say, “Well, thanks so much for your offer, but we’ve really got more than we can handle already” before the door shuts. But I’ve managed to wedge my foot in. Please don’t crush it. 


It has taken me a long time to get here. You see, our history – Emily’s and Mine – goes back a long way. I was a bookish child, and strange, and ugly. I won a prize in the fourth grade for a poem I wrote about the sea and the wind (an appropriate subject for a poem, n’est-ce pas?) and as a prize received a slim volume of Emily Dickinson poems along with a ribbon. I read them, and I would tell any adult that asked that “Yes, I liked them very much” if only because I had already decided that I Liked Poems and these were the only ones I had seen that weren’t nursery rhymes (but weren’t they? A little?) I don’t remember the poems I read from that time, but I remember the book itself – a yellowish gold with her picture on the front: Rosy cheeks and a fluffy halo of hair and an enormous white collar. I thought she looked ugly. Like me. 


I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you Nobody, too?
Why, yes, I am. Thank you so much for asking. 


So I told people I liked them if they asked, but they rarely did, and while I remember carrying it with me everywhere, I do not remember reading them, and soon, by and large, they were forgotten. 


I remained bookish. I remained strange. I even remained ugly – well, if not truly ugly than pudgy and plain and awkward. Only now, my strangeness I turned into black high necked dresses, white rice powder make up, black lipstick, big boots, the Bauhaus, the Cure. I read Camus, and Sartre. I was a teenaged existentialist smoking clove cigarettes behind the tennis courts. And still Emily Dickinson was pushed at me. “You’re young. You’re a girl. You like poems.” And they thought they would snare me with that old “I’m nobody, who are you?” business. But all I heard was greeting cards, proper tea parties. The poems smacked of churchy obedience, some unintelligible “nature” poems about Gentians and Bees. It made me sick . I turned my back on her in favor of Our Great Martyr Sylvia Plath, the dark witchiness of Ann Sexton (I had, indeed, been Her Kind). And those disciplined rhyming things that sounded so much like church? Please. The very thought. Just who did they think I was? 

Welcome to Alice Oddcabinet's Emily Dickinson Project. The idea is, in order to create more order and structure to my life and work, I would develop a self-guided reading list, a syllabus, of sorts.

This is divided into three sections of four weeks each: Biography, Manuscripts & Fascicles, and Poetics & Aesthetics. Each week is comprised of readings from her poetry, readings from critical essays, and there is the possibility of adding readings from her letters as well (dependant upon availability from the Uni Library). Each week will also consist of writing: in the form of close reading journals, as well as 5-10 more formal pages at the end of each section.

May 13th is Emily Dickinson Day at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, which happens every year on the Saturday closest to her death-day, May 15th. This (self) guided exploration will end there that weekend, and culminate in a long piece of writing.

I will post the reading list and timetable, and the more formal writings as well. I hope to also post a summary of my close reading journal on a more regular basis.

Anyone may read the entries, but I ask that you ask to be added as a friend in order to comment. If you do ask to be added, I will almost always comply, no questions asked. Feel free to accompany me on this project, but know that this time, I am NOT the teacher. I am NOT teaching a class on Emily Dickinson. I am TAKING one. I am also not looking for criticism of my writing here; I have trusted readers in Real Life for this. However, if you, too are interested in exploring your relationship with Emily Dickinson, please feel free to come along. I would enjoy the company.

Soon there will be a syllabus posted here. I promise. Later toay.