Emily Dickinson’s poetry has had, despite the quirks of her punctuation, an outsized influence on contemporary poetry. Or maybe because of them. Since April is National Poetry Month, and I post on this blog on the 4th Thursday (and occasionally a bit later), I want to examine her influence — in advance and in honor of National Poetry Month, of course. I want to look at that influence on recent poetry by American poets. In my last post I introduced two of the five of Dickinson’s poems selected by Cristanne Miller to illustrate her hypotheses regarding Dickinson’s grammar, and left you looking at one of them, “He fumbles at your Soul.”
You will recall that that poem makes a rather abrupt jump at the end, from one metaphorical world to another. I haven’t found this to be happening before Dickinson (except possibly in the poems of Joseph Smith, an attribution with which you may argue, but not with me). Here is an example of that kind of jump in contemporary poetry (I am shamelessly stealing all of these contemporary poems from the Academy of American Poets’ “poem-a-day,” to which you should all subscribe[i]):
*****When Doves
At the columbarium dug
by hand, a man points to where rock
doves would be brought to nest, their eggs
tended by priests, and the cave locked
at sundown, guarded by hired
knives. The flock meant meat for the dry
times; saltpeter; yolks needed to bind
portraits to walls, to raise a sky
gilded with violets and myrrh.
Tonight, my mother paints her nails
black—a shade she names, “Dark Matter.”
She numbers what’s left of her cells,
tells us of this burning inside
her knees, laughs a promise to fight.
— R. A. Villanueva[ii]
Like Dickinson, Villaneuva makes elliptical reference to contemporary matters, and to popular culture, like Prince’s song “When Doves Cry.” It hints a little more subtly at matters of life and death than Dickinson did, using far more compression. And it makes that abrupt leap at the end, from the imagery associated with monastic life to images associated with death — which are not out of keeping with the mention of saltpeter and hired knives. I don’t know whether Villaneuva would claim, or even recognize, her influence, but she is there like an observer through a mirrored window.
The next poem Miller chose, “This was a Poet – It is that”, she uses to illustrate what she calls “Nonrecoverable Deletion” — still an element of compression, but also of parataxis. Here’s the poem:
This was a Poet – It is that
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings –
And Attar so immense
From the familiar species
That perished by the Door –
We wonder it was not Ourselves
Arrested it – before –
Of Pictures, the Discloser –
The Poet – it is He –
Entitles Us – by Contrast –
To ceaseless Poverty –
Of Portion – so unconscious –
The Robbing – could not harm –
Himself – to Him – a Fortune –
Exterior – to Time – [iii]
I’m going to quote Miller’s analysis at length here: “there are several ways to recover the complete (or deep) syntax of the first line’s ‘It is That.’ One might fill in the deletions of the first stanza as follows:
This was a Poet – It is {the fact}That {this was a poet which}
Distills amazing sense
From ordinary Meanings –
And {distills an} Attar {that is} so immense . . .
Or the second sentence might begin: ‘. . . It is That{(the poet), which} Distills . . .’; or ‘It {the poet} is that {which} . . .’; or ‘This {poem} was a Poet – It {the text} is That {which} . . .’ Recovery of the deleted syntax here is inseparable from interpretation of the poem. In nonrecoverable deletion, this is always the case.”[iv]
Recognizing that Miller is working in the realm of Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar does little to diminish her main point, which is that Dickinson requires close reading, or as Miller puts it: “Were Dickinson’s poems less compressed, less economical as a whole, important nonrecoverable deletions would be easier to isolate and the poems would invite less actively expectant reading.”[v]
This poem also illustrates another trait of Dickinson’s writing: parataxis. Miller characterizes its appearance in Dickinson’s poetry thus: “Dickinson tends to write either in short, simple, subject-verb-object sentences or in highly clausal, complex sentences. The former syntax characterizes the majority of her sentences and is paratactic.” The next contemporary poem I offer combines both methods, and may at first seem almost Whitmanic:
*****Utopia: Love as Last Day
The forest rings so wide, it is the world. The sky, ocean, hand
In hand rising to tides, particulate excreta. The river mouth
The moon lights in blindness through the forest, hot, tumbling silver by houses
Like mushrooms crowded. Ladder by ladder, neighbors pass ore in ladles
While this planet hushes into a cinder. The moon unlocks its continents of water
So the outline of a sail appears as its cobalt face—the forest
A ring tight as the throat sings wider: who arrives
Who arrives who arrives. In the office I ask
If the cup my coworker is holding is real. It doesn’t look real. It looks like math’s
Translated bed. Beside their chainsaws, loggers smoking—brain-
Dead, lung-dead, I am the operator of something—the mouth with green rot touching
The metal slurry of the ocean.
The singer sings the last verse. The last
Song we hear, stepping outside the heat
Into the dark pine, the moon dissolving like lead.
In the office I ask, How could the news come?
In our terror echoing as profit.
— Joe Hall[vi]
Despite the long lines, there is none of Whitman’s open-armed embrace of all the world. In fact, there is a fair amount of Dickinsonian despair on display here. And it illustrates perfectly what Miller says is the effect of parataxis: “Successive short sentences or sentence units allow a particularly quick movement from metaphor to metaphor, or from abstract pronouncement to particular example back to pronouncement, or from scene to apparent conclusion as in ‘He fumbles at your soul.’ Consequently, the opportunities for understated connection are multiple. Dickinson juxtaposes the stages of an idea or story rather than explaining their progression.”[vii]
Here is another example of the strength of Dickinson’s paratactic strategy:
To pile like Thunder to it’s close
Then crumble grand away
While Everything created hid
This – would be Poetry –
Or Love – the two coeval come –
We both and neither prove –
Experience either and consume –
For None see God and live – [viii]
That last line comes out of nowhere and kicks me upside the head. When I recover, I admire the way in which Dickinson comes back to a cosmic conclusion from a beginning metaphor that seems completed in the first stanza. I will end this investigation into that rhetorical strategy by calling on another of our contemporaries:
*****Opportunity Costs
Thrushes, alert for opportunity,
sleep in winks of thirty seconds or less.
Has Guinness tracked the longest sigh on record
and was it exhaled in exasperation or ecstasy?
In the measure of apothecaries, one scruple
equals twenty grains, a lot of data to debunk.
Four centuries ago a watchmaker set up the first circus
of fleas tied to carts. Since then,
entertainment has changed a lot—explosions, all the rage.
Not long ago whistling in an office could get you fired,
and now who of us blinks at torture taken to the brink
of drowning, not once per body, but a vomitous number
I’m not going to hurt you with, and who asks how often
mouth-to-mouth—the torturer locking lips with the tortured
to revive him for another round. An alarm rings
to wake the thrush for the next
threat, thus serving the species for survival
of the fittest, while in the Situation Room, our best,
fit to kill, compute opportunity costs with the poise
of the guys whose billboards brag, “We buy ugly houses.”
Give me the scale that weighs a whistle, a flea,
the song of a thrush, the sum of pain caused
by people of conscience, people ignoring it.
Is opportunity tired of being missed?
Does it sigh the way we sigh?
— Barbara Ras[ix]
Talk about “opportunities for understated connection”! This poem, in its final sighing, seems to me to “crumble grand away” in the manner that Miller summarizes thus: “Parataxis could be called a disjunctive or coordinate linking of ideas rather than a thematic or subordinate linking. Information is presented sequentially, without hierarchical restriction or conjunction.”[x] Ras seems to move paratactically through the poem until it reaches the images of waterboarding. After exploring the implications, she jumps again, bringing in all the images she has worked into the poem, then personifying “opportunity.” It does not get tied up in a neat bundle so much as rolled into another question, another opportunity to go back and re-read the poem.
So go back and re-read it. While you do, I will fold my tent and silently steal away.
But hold on, I hear you say: Didn’t you just sneak an awful lot of syntactical analysis into what was supposed to be a celebration?
Your turn.
[i] At poets.org, of course.
[ii] Copyright © 2016 R. A. Villanueva, from Reliquaria / R. A. Villanueva. — (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), as posted on “poem-a-day” by the Academy of American Poets for 14 March 2016.
[iii] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999; p. 206, no. 446 in Franklin, and no. 448 in The poems of Emily Dickinson : including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts / edited by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955. This is the source Cristanne Miller cites, since she was writing before Franklin’s edition was published. Franklin prints the first stanza in five lines, with the 1st line broken at the dash.
[iv] Emily Dickinson : A Poet’s Grammar / Cristanne Miller. – Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1987; pp. 28-29.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Copyright © 2016 Joe Hall, from The Devotional Poems / Joe Hall. — (Black Ocean, 2013), as posted on “poem-a-day” by the Academy of American Poets for 15 March 2016.
[vii] Op. cit., p. 30.
[viii] The poems of Emily Dickinson / edited by R.W. Franklin. — Reading ed. — Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999; p. 521, no. 1353 in Franklin, and no. 1247 in The poems of Emily Dickinson : including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts / edited by Thomas H. Johnson. — Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955.
[ix] Copyright © 2016 Barbara Ras, from The Last Skin / Barbara Ras. — (Penguin Books, 2010), as posted on “poem-a-day” by the Academy of American Poets for 17 March 2016.
[x] Op. cit., p. 31.
I like the insight that parataxis is better suited to juxtaposition than to describing or explaining an evolution, which in turn reminds me of the critical dictum that in the romance, character is revealed, as opposed to the novel where character develops. Does Dickinson reveal where Whitman evolves?