Gregory Orrexcerpt from two chapters from Poetry as Survival
How strange to be Emily Dickinson. She is so much smarter and livelier than anyone around her--an inevitable conclusion for anyone who has experienced the delight of reading her letters. And yet, she is a woman. What can she do with her intelligence and imagination? She can't become a lawyer or doctor or professor. She can't go into business. All that her small-town New England world held out to her as possibilities were marriage and mother-hood or spinsterhood. No wonder she thought she would burst. No wonder her poems explode.With Emily Dickinson more than with any of my other heroes of imagination, I am concerned that by trying to pinpoint what specific trauma assailed her, I may be on the wrong track. Ultimately, it's pointless to attempt to locate the specific traumas that initiated the desolation and radical freedom that gave rise to the self-creation of her poems. All we could hope to do is guess. The worst situation of all would be the error of psychoanalytic -criticism: to think that by locating and labeling the poet's trauma, we had found out his or her secrets. To think that way would be to look down the wrong end of the telescope at diminishment.
We need to go in the opposite direction: recognizing that the poet's trauma initiates the struggle of transformation that leads to the richly proliferating and glorious incarnations of the poems.
We can't know what hurt Emily Dickinson so, but we do know that something hurt her with enormous force, again and again:
It struck me--every Day-- The Lightning was as new As if the Cloud that instant slit And let the Fire through-- It burned me--in the Night-- It Blistered to My Dream-- It sickened fresh upon my sight-- With every Morn that came-- I thought that Storm--was brief-- The Maddest--quickest by-- But Nature lost the Date of This-- And left it in the Sky----#362And we know that she responded bravely, that she "love(d) to buffet the sea!" She meant, of course, an inner sea: the sea of subjectivity, of the rise and fall, the ebb and flow and wild, wave-torn storms of the emotional life. Such storms, turned into words, might take the form of incantatory raptures on an imagined, intimate ecstasy:
Wild Nights--Wild Nights! Were I with thee Wild Nights would be Our Luxury! Futile--the Winds-- To a Heart in port-- Done with the Compass-- Done with the Chart! Rowing in Eden-- Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor--Tonight-- In Thee!--#249Or they might articulate despair and fear of madness:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading--treading--till it seemed That Sense was breaking through-- And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum-- Kept beating--beating--till I thought My Mind was going numb-- And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space--began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here-- And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down-- And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing--then----#280Dickinson can hymn desolation and agony:
The Heart asks Pleasure--first-- And then--Excuse from Pain-- And then--those little Anodynes That deaden suffering-- And then--to go to sleep-- And then--if it should be The will of its Inquisitor The privilege to die----#536And just as fervently, the defiant free will of creativity exemplified by the writing of poems:
They shut me up in Prose-- As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet-- Because they like me "still"-- Still! Could themself have peeped-- And seen my Brain--go round-- They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason--in the Pound-- Himself has but to will And easy as a Star Abolish his Captivity-- And laugh--No more have I----#613She can articulate a sense of cryptic wonder:
I am afraid to own a Body-- I am afraid to own a Soul-- Profound--precarious Property----from #1090Or brood on the loss of religious faith:
Those--dying then, Knew where they went-- They went to God's Right Hand-- That Hand is amputated now And God cannot be found----from #1551or the mystical humbling of the human heart:
Not with a Club, the Heart is broken Nor with a Stone-- A Whip so small you could not see it I've known To lash the Magic Creature . . .--from #1304With Emily Dickinson, it might seem as if we were talking about the poetry of survival--a -restabilizing of self through poetic ordering. But subjectivity is so rampant and intense for Dickinson that the truest thing we might risk saying is that -subjectivity itself could be said to constitute her trauma. Her emotional life was so excruciatingly volatile and her solitude so deep that simple conscious existence represented a potential shattering of self. And she responds to this curious threat with an equally powerful ordering self, a self created in and through the poems.
Gregory Orr's eighth book of poems, The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in April, 2002. His memoir, The Blessing, will appear from Council Oaks Books later this year. This article is excerpted from Poetry as Survival, to be published by the University of Georgia Press this year in its Life of Poetry series. Orr is a Professor of English at the University of Virginia and poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review and an editor of Sacred Bearings: A Journal for Survivors.
